MAMista (22 page)

‘Your people are in the rain forest, Ramón,' said Marti. ‘Mine are in the towns. My men are vulnerable in ways that your men are not.'

Provocatively Big Jorge said, ‘Then they must take part in the active struggle, Dr Marti.'

‘No one is asking for that,' Ramón said urgently. He knew that this apparent plea for support was only Big Jorge's way of driving a wedge between himself and Marti. Marti's force was efficient when it wanted to be: the way that Marti could be spirited off to such meetings as this was evidence of the conspiratorial skills of the old-time communists. But if they took to the field, Marti's men would have
to take orders from the most experienced commander, which could only mean Ramón. Marti would die rather than let that happen.

Ramón said, ‘We all need the fruits of your excellent intelligence service, Professor Dr Marti. We need to know where the army will strike after the rains. And in what strength. We need to know if the Americans will let the government have helicopters … and gunships, and if so how many.'

‘Helicopters,' said Marti. Having sipped his lemonade he pursed his lips. It was difficult to know whether this grimace was at the prospect of sharing his intelligence. He spooned more sugar into his glass before drinking again. Asked the unanswerable, Marti always fell back on his lecture notes. ‘Helicopters do not change the basic character of the socialist struggle, nor the inevitability of the fall of capital.'

‘But they do kill guerrilleros,' said Ramón in a pleasant voice.

‘Yes, they do,' said Marti seriously. He preferred to discuss such things as objectively as possible, and he was heartened to think that Ramón might be learning some of the same equanimity from him. Marti searched through the pockets of his cream-coloured linen jacket to find his curly Meerschaum pipe. His party was now dominated by middle-class members. They used their CP cards to assuage the guilt of the nearby shantytowns, and of the sight of starving beggars who were arrested if they went into the tourist sectors of the city. Thus Marti's bourgeoisie demonstrated its political passion, while the Benz regime enjoyed a feeling of political toleration. Out of this came Marti's power. From his middle-class members, with their entrée to bureau and to business, came his intelligence system.

Perversely Marti refused to admit that his party was no longer worker-based. So he could not bring himself to provide for Ramón any information of the sort he needed. Marti pushed tobacco into his pipe and lit it carefully. ‘Helicopters are dangerous,' he said finally.

Ramón tried again. ‘Dr Guizot would appreciate even a demonstration … If your electricity workers could black out the capital. If the airport could be brought to a standstill for two or three days. Anything that would make them think that we are
all
going to do battle against them.'

Big Jorge wheezed again. The smell of Marti's pipe tobacco had awakened his craving. He reached into his pocket for a cigar and bit off the end of it. He sniffed it and lit it. He did not offer one to the others. Such personal habits often provide a clue to a man's nature, thought Ramón. A man who did not even think of offering his companions a chance to share his food, his drink or his smokes was not the sort of man to be with in the jungle. There were not many men who were, and Ramón felt a sudden deep affection for Maestro and Santos and all the men who served with him.

From the other end of the table, one of the other delegates spoke. He was a tough little black miner who had formed a breakaway trade union for the open-cast quarry workers who used to be with Marti. He had long ago lost any illusions about Marti. He asked if Marti knew anything about the Soviet Union's payments to Castro Cuba. Already the contributions from Spain's government to Cuba had ended. When those big Russian payments stopped too, the shock would eventually be felt by everyone around the table. But if Marti knew he wasn't telling. He gave a long answer that revealed nothing.

Ramón did not listen to Marti. He was wondering if his demand for support had been wise. What would these men do if Ramón stood up and told them that without their strenuous help, his MAMista army might be utterly destroyed before the time came around for the next frente meeting?

He looked round the table. They were hard, self-centred men. All, for their different reasons, regarded Ramón as a heretic. Perhaps they would not fling a match upon the tinder at his feet, but neither were they likely to break
through the cordon to fling a bucket of water. Perhaps he had gone far enough in admitting his need. More admissions might only hasten his demise. There was another way, but it didn't include the people around this table. If they were determined to force him to go to the enemy and make a deal, so be it. They were all looking at him. Automatically Ramón said, ‘We have never ceased the struggle. Be assured we will not stop now.'

Marti attended to his curly pipe as a device to keep them waiting for his ponderous dicta. When he had it going well, he puffed smoke and said, ‘You speak to me of fighting, Ramón, as if it should grant you sole right to our combined resources.' Marti looked at Big Jorge. Big Jorge nodded.

Ramón tried to hide his feelings. If Ramón failed, Marti's members would thank the old man for keeping them out of it. If Ramón succeeded, then it would be Marti's members who inherited the power of an exhausted fighting force. Marti leaned forward and stroked his beard. When he spoke he was committing the words to memory. He wanted to write this reply into his memoirs, which were already half-finished. ‘We will give you anything you ask to continue the struggle, but do not ask a condor to fight alongside the fishes. We are not equipped to join you in the rain forest, Ramón.' He nodded.

Ramón picked up his beer and sipped some. He did it as a way of concealing the rage that welled up in him. He was angry at himself for ever believing that these people might listen to him and want to help. Why should he ever have expected to find any more sentiment in politics than there was in detergents, in shipping, in oil or in the stock exchange?

Big Jorge got up and walked across the carpet to pour himself another brandy. He stood at the wooden grille. It was dark and cool in the room but outside in the courtyard the sun was hot and quickly evaporated the water that spilled over from the fountain. From the kitchens there came
the sounds of men working and on the air there was an aroma of woodsmoke. Big Jorge said, ‘I've arranged a good meal:
matambre.'

Ramón's men were hungry. They did not often see the rolled beef ‘hunger-killer' that Big Jorge was setting before them.

‘Wonderful,' said Professor Dr Marti, although his asceticism gave him preferences for light foods of vegetable origin.

‘We are all indebted to you,' Ramón said as Big Jorge resumed his seat at the conference table. Perhaps Big Jorge had not said it to remind Ramón that this lunch, like much of the food that filtered down to the MAMistas in the south, was carried illicitly, and at considerable risk, by truck drivers under Big Jorge's banner.

And perhaps Professor Dr Marti's nod was not a reminder that most of that food, as inadequate as it might be, originated from delivery dockets padded and forged by his party members. Ramón knew that his bargaining power was undermined by his dependence upon these two men. He'd hoped to use the posthumous goodwill of Dr Guizot as a lever upon them. But they were shrewd enough to see that no political advancement could come to them by advancing the cause of the Guizot–Ramón axis.

‘The opportunity will never be better,' said Ramón, trying one last time. ‘This winter, while flying conditions are at the worst, and before the Federalistas get American help … With the peseta falling and a renewed campaign of violence in our towns … This winter we could achieve power, comrades.'

Marti shook his head sadly. ‘Your forces are weak and you are too dependent upon the cities for your food and your ammunition. Also the peasants in the northwest are not won over to your struggle.'

Ramón could have retorted that peasants in the northwest were cocaleros making big bucks for Big Jorge. They had
become a part of the drugs network that was grossing almost a billion dollars a year. They would never be won over to any workers' struggle.

Perhaps seeing what was in Ramón's mind, Big Jorge said, ‘Think what road-blocks would do. Road-blocks round all the important towns, and road junctions. What would that do to your supplies? Already the army is doing random checks on traffic in and out of the capital. By the end of the year, will they not be squeezing you?'

‘We'll ambush their convoys and attack their checkpoints,' Ramón said.

‘Of course you will,' Big Jorge replied patiently. ‘But they can spare soldiers in a way that you can't spare suppliers.' Or the help of my drivers, he might have added.

Professor Dr Marti took his pipe from his mouth and waved it. Always the theorist he said, ‘Your weakness is that the northern part of your province was an army exercise area for so long. The peasants got used to the soldiers, and the army knows its way around there. In the central provinces there is residual hatred for the army; you do not have that advantage in the south.'

‘The peasants understand,' Ramón said, and only with difficulty suppressed the words – better than you do.

Dr Marti smiled. He reached out and touched Ramón's shoulder. ‘You are a fine man and a good comrade, Ramón. And yet I fear you believe we fail in our duty to you.'

Ramón said nothing.

Marti said, ‘You think my heart does not bleed for your sufferings? You think I don't weep for your casualties? You believe that this revolution can be completed overnight, but it will take a decade … a decade, if we are lucky. Two decades if the economy does not improve.'

These last words made Ramón look up sharply. He raised an eyebrow.

Marti met his eyes. ‘Ah, yes. You have seen the movement and the violencia grow from the soil of economic
hardship. You have recruited from depressed regions. You wish to believe that these are signs of the capitalist system destroying itself. But look at Eastern Europe.'

At the other end of the table someone sighed. Glasnost, perestroika, and all the other news of far-off political turbulence, had no relevance for the deep-seated problems of Latin America. They were sick of being told Karl Marx was dead when they all knew that Karl Marx had simply been betrayed by selfish materialistic European workers.

Marti was determined to persuade them. He had been to Europe on one of his continual rounds of lecture tours. Leaning forward he said, ‘The workers no longer look to Marx for economic miracles. I am convinced that we must take over a thriving economy, with full employment and foreign investments, if we are to provide the masses with the rewards that are their right.'

‘In such a booming economy we would not secure enough support,' Ramón said.

‘Ramón – you show such little faith. Is there no surplus value in every man's labour?'

Ramón did not reply. Both men knew each other's arguments so well that they could have exchanged roles without fluffing the lines.

Someone at the other end of the table said, ‘Are you saying that we can promise only
redistribution
of wealth, Professor Marti?'

Aware that his questioner, a bitter townsman who'd lost an arm in the battle for the customs house, would quote him, Marti said, ‘The redistribution of wealth is necessary to a rich economy. By refuelling a stalled and stagnant capitalist economy we can provide added wealth.'

No one spoke. So far the meeting had done nothing except reinforce the ideas that every delegate had come here with. Nothing new had been said; no new thoughts exchanged. Ramón said, ‘I will visit the sentries on the outer posts when it starts to cool off. Who will come with me?'

Even this dialogue was predictable. Big Jorge would not move without the protection of his bodyguards. Professor Dr Marti would not risk a recurrence of his bad back.

‘It would give the men great pleasure,' Ramón persisted. ‘Along the outer ring to the river posts … It will be like old times. The men would enjoy seeing us together.'

‘I would enjoy it too,' Marti said. ‘Next time perhaps, when I am better fitted for the jungle. I fear I have become a desk-revolutionary these days.'

Ramón said, ‘The men still remember, Dr Marti … we all still remember, you leading the attack on the customs house.'

‘So long ago,' said Marti. One of the house servants came in silently and stood by the door. It was a signal to say that lunch was ready.

Big Jorge took off his tinted glasses and ran a fingertip round his eye. ‘When it is cool we will talk more,' he promised and finished his drink.

Still exchanging pleasantries, the delegates got up from the conference table and moved along the corridor to the dining-room. The sentry saluted, then opened the door for them with all the deference that a butler would grant to a Duke.

It was a lovely room. Its french window gave on to a tiny tiled patio and provided a view of the courtyard. There were locally woven carpets on the floor and a landscape painting hung over the huge carved fireplace.

As they sat down, Marti said, ‘Are my men having the same meal?'

‘Yes, they are,' said Big Jorge, making no effort to disguise his irritation at such pomposity. Ramón smiled. He saw such remarks as a symptom of Professor Dr Marti's age, as much as of his pretensions.

Ramón was the first of the men at the table to hear the plane, but already the guards and the sentries had it under observation. The unusual push-pull configuration of the
two Continental engines made a sound that was easily distinguished. The Cessnas were designed for military reconnaissance and Ramón recognized it only too well.

Ramón went to the window and called to his men. ‘René, I want everyone to wave if that plane comes back this way. Make sure there is no one wearing armbands or carrying guns.' Then he saw Santos on the rooftop. Santos saluted to acknowledge the order.