A Meeting with Polito Torres (the interview finally!)

A Meeting with ‘El Capitan Descalzo’




I am climbing up a hilly road at the bottom of the Sierra Maestra, in Cuba, in the beat-up Lada I’ve been driving for 400 km. ‘Which house does Polito Torres, ‘El Capitan Descalzo’, live in?’ I ask a young guajiro, as they call the campesinos here. ‘The last one to the left, up there’. My journey is over-I found him! I don’t realize how wrong I am, my journey has just begun. I am about to listen and re-live the times in the Sierra Maestra when Polito Torres and Che Guevara were fighting in the Cuban revolution…There are few telephones here and I was not able to make any arrangements for an interview and as I drive up the hill I see a man sitting on the porch in his chair, he is quite thin, blond, with catching blue eyes, wearing no shoes. He looks at me as I get out of the car as if he had been sitting there waiting for me to show up all along. I did not come this far just to meet Che Guevara’s companion and life-long friend, I hope to understand how it is that a farmer in the countryside became involved in the revolution, what he sees in Cuba’s future and what made his friendship with Che so unique…
I am greeted with open arms and a smile by Polo Torres Guerra, ‘Polito’, who, hearing my Italian accent, tells me he has been to Italy and travelled to over 22 cities in my country but of all the places he visited his favourite is Sardinia. I thought I would meet a farmer who had never left Cuba and, as I come from Sardinia originally, I also realize I could have interviewed him without having to cross the ocean…. Upon hearing this, I am about to fall over: I am not sure if it is due to the surprise, the heat or both! Never judge a book by its cover!

Me: ‘When did you first meet Ernesto Che Guevara?’

Polito: ‘It was May 1957, and I would set out every morning from my farm in Manzanillo, up into the Sierra Maestra, looking for the revolutionary army that I hoped to join. However, I could never locate Che and his men. Until one day it was Che Guevara who found me in the forest. I immediately told him I wanted to join their efforts and help the revolutionary cause. To prove the seriousness of my intentions I offered him my farm and everything on it as a gift for the revolution.

Me: ‘Did you join the rebels then?’

Polito: ‘Yes, I was taken on as their guide initially because I knew the area very well but my efforts and good intentions at times gave unexpected results…the men in the army had been rounded up with mostly amateur fighters and farmers, few had received professional training prior and the difficulties of the daily existence in the Sierra, with little or no food, coupled with fighting, had severely worn down the men physically. My first efforts were to provide them with food. I prepared a great banquet, slaughtering pigs from my farm and cooking for them. The men ate everything leaving nothing, as they had not eaten in such abundance in months. The next morning when I went up to the Sierra to meet Che and ask what the orders were I was greeted by him in serious and stern tone ‘You have attempted to sabotage me Polito, you poisoned my army! After the dinner you prepared the men are all sick either with diahorrea or vomit, they were no longer used to eating so much!’. I was incorporated in the army little by little with different tasks, from building a camp hospital, providing the men with food and serving as messenger, showing the army the best paths in the mountains and setting up the print to publish the rebel paper ‘El Cubano Libre’ and radio broadcasting. It was Che who would one day name me Captain and for my reluctance to use shoes which I had hardly ever worn, I became ‘El Capitan Descalzo’ (the barefoot Captain).

Me: ‘Did you also meet Fidel Castro when you were part of the rebel army?’

Polito: ‘Yes of course. He often stayed at my farm together with the rest of the army in those days. I remember the first time I met him I had been sent on a mission from Che who explicitly briefed me ‘go and meet Fidel who has to tell you something very important, but no one can know this, it is a secret.’ When I had Fidel in front of me he asked me ‘what did Guevara tell you?’ to which I replied ‘nothing!’ Fidel Castro looked at me and laughed seeing I was refusing to tell him what Che has said to me and asked me to ‘(I need you to) find a safe place where we can set up a storage camp for our weapons’. When I returned to the camp Che asked me ‘So what did Castro have to say?’ to which I replied ‘nothing’ and he too started laughing seeing how determined I was to keep the secret. Those who at the time were leading the revolution and would become its symbol often stayed on my farm in that period. At one moment a month after the fight at Pino del Agua I had Fidel, Che, Raul, Almeida and Cienfuegos all in my house together.

Me: ‘How would you describe Che? What is it that made you respect him and that bonded your friendship?’

Polito: ‘Ernesto Che Guevara was a man out of the ordinary, whenever I am in front of a problem that apparently does not have a solution, I repeat to myself the words he would often say to me: ‘Polo find a way’. He was not just brave, he knew how to impose discipline with the troops and gain their respect by setting the example himself. Suffering from chronic and acute asthma attacks and often lacking medicine to sedate them, I never heard him complain or leave a task unfinished. It was beyond everything his humane character that made him so unique. He was, for Juana and myself, a guide and example as well as a caretaker, always looking after us and worrying that we were well. He would often reprimand me for my escapades, telling me that my wife Juana was a brave and exceptional woman and that I should treat her well. I remember he wanted to teach both of us to read and write, so he had called in a teacher to live with us while the guerrilla was still on-going. The only problem was that I was too distracted by the teacher and whilst my wife learned, I was too busy admiring her! Che seemed to always find out everything and he reprimanded me and told me to‘think carefully about what I was doing’.

Me: ‘How did you find out Che had been killed?’(I notice a strong change in the glance Polito has, as he tilts his head away from me, almost trying to keep that memory private, something I will not understand, it’s clear, no matter what words he will use to explain that moment to me).

Polito: ‘I was on the farm at home, when I received the news. I started crying like a child who has lost his father and without feeling any shame because of it. At first I did not want to believe it and I ran into town to see if I could get more news proving the contrary. When I finally had the confirmation that the news was certain I started kicking myself for not having accepted Che’s invite the last time we saw each other, when he had asked me to go with him to the ‘volunteer days in the field’ to cut cane. I thought that perhaps if I had accepted he would have also involved me in his future mission in Bolivia and I could have been there fighting next to him, as we had done so many times in the past.

Me: ‘What do you think will become of Cuba after Castro?

Polito: ‘I was born on the 13 of August, just like Fidel Castro, but I am a few years his junior, I realized yesterday that I just turned 78. It is difficult to say what will happen ‘after’. I chose to remain a farmer and go back to my life as it was before the revolution, I was never made for and never liked the army. When Che insisted that I join the newly forming government, to work in the Ministry of Agriculture and development I refused and flew back to my farm from Havana. I became involved in the ‘maintenance’ of the revolution at local level with the CDR (Committee of Defence of the Revolution), where I felt I could be most useful. Cuba has undergone radical changes from when I was a child. For example I was the second of 14 siblings, 4 of which died due to typhoid and the lack of proper medicines. When I was 7 I was already working in the fields. There were no roads or very few, schools were scarce and not open to everyone to attend. I believe wherever the future may take us, the lessons learned fighting with Che and his men should stay with us, the importance of strong beliefs and the will to act on those beliefs are universal values that we should pass on to our children and help them remember their significance. This is why I have called my farm ‘Valle Grande’, to honour Che’s memory.

Before leaving ‘Valle Grande’ Polito takes me for a tour of his house. He asks me if I want to take a picture the ‘three’ of us. At first I don’t understand. We then go inside and on the wall hangs a picture of Ernesto Che Guevara. I cannot help thinking that while for most of us who have grown with posters or other reproductions of Che, he represented a myth hanging on our wall next to our favourite pop singer, for Polito Che was his friend and the picture hanging there is not a reproduction, I will not find it on a t-shirt sold at a corner of the London underground…