A companion of Che and Fidel had fine stories to tell, writes HUGH O'SHAUGHNESSYin Havana
MY FRIEND Veraly runs a small but cosmopolitan restaurant called Cuba Italia with very good food in the old part of this city.
It stands on the corner of O’Reilly Street in the old town and its name commemorates the tough and distinguished general, Alexander O’Reilly, born in Dublin in 1722, who fought for Spain and, as commander of the Spanish forces, in 1762 received this city back from the British, who had conquered it briefly 250 years ago.
So when Veraly suggested a dinner party in her upstairs dining room the other day, I jumped at the chance of learning a bit more of Cuban history.
She herself is black and was born 44 years ago at Palma Soriano in the Oriente, the blackest part of the country.
The town is not far from the US-run penal colony at Guantánamo Bay, where for years Washington kept thousands of Haitians prisoners. They had been picked up illegally by US naval vessels on the high seas where their flimsy vessels were destroyed because the US did not want them washing up on the coasts of Florida alive or dead.
Now the place is an equally illegal place of confinement for men seized during the Iraq and Afghan invasions. US president Barack Obama swore to close it but he somehow continues to allow it to survive.
Veraly told me that Remigio “Remi” Chang, a military man and her teacher of English who had had more than his fair share of experience of the island’s history, would be joining her mother Amarylis and me at the dinner table: in the event her cooking and his conversation made the evening a memorable one.
Retired now from the army and from the Cuban diplomatic service, Remi has wonderful stories to tell.
As his name and the oriental features suggest, he is the descendant of Chinese immigrants from Shanghai to Cuba, then still a Spanish colony, a century and a half ago. They were recruited to replace slave labour at a time when the future of slavery was precarious and men had to be recruited from somewhere for the hot and heavy job of cutting sugar cane under a burning tropical sun and hauling it to the sugar mills.
As a youngster Remi was on the side of Castro, opposed the western-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and it did not take him long to make his mark as a member of the rebel army.
He remembers his early conversations on strategy with Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary doctor who went on many missions on behalf of his adoptive country Cuba.
“The force of his ideas was overwhelming,” recalls Remi. “No one picked an argument unless they had to.”
Remi was sent to Angola as part of the force that was narrowly victorious in halting the advance of South Africa’s army to the capital Luanda. If they had succeeded in taking it, the whites would have brought apartheid to vast new areas of Africa. Eventually promoted to colonel he was made a senior member of the general staff and was later appointed a military attache in the Soviet Union before returning to Havana to teach and write about the Angola campaign.
Later he was taken on by the foreign ministry in Havana and named ambassador in a number of diplomatic missions in Africa. He lives very modestly in the old city and expressed interest in the book I published in 1984 about the US invasion of Grenada, which I had witnessed on the island a few months previously.
Remi hopes to partake in the writing of a new Cuban view of the Angolan campaign.
He is conscious of the delicate military and diplomatic problems surrounding his own participation in the preparation of a new history, but a new volume would be a valuable contribution to Cuban, African and world history. He hopes Cuba will find an English-language publisher.
With his wealth of experience he is unlikely to experience much difficulty in finding one. Alexander O’Reilly would surely have been fascinated if he ever had encountered him.