Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  The young man was telling me that he expected to defeat Batista in some future landing that he planned to carry out with men “when I have them,” and with vessels “when I have the money to buy them.” At that moment, however, he had not a single man or a single dollar.… Wasn’t it amusing? He was asking me whether I would commit myself to teach guerrilla tactics to his future soldiers.… But what did it cost me to please him? “Yes,” I said. “Yes, Fidel, I promise to instruct these boys the moment it is necessary.”26

  Castro, just turned 29, had already won the first three members of his expeditionary force: his brother Raúl, five years younger than himself; his old comrade Antonio “Nico” López; and a 27-year-old Argentinean asthmatic with wheezing lungs, Ernesto Guevara, whom his friends called by the Argentinean slang word for buddy, “Che.”

  “Che” was a doctor and a convinced Marxist, who had already been in Mexico City for three-quarters of a year, since September 1954. On his way there from Buenos Aires, he had spent some time in Guatemala and seen how, in response to a law on agrarian reform, the United States government, the United Fruit Company and CIA-funded mercenaries, together with disloyal officers in the Guatemalan army, had overthrown the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. After fruitless attempts to help build a kind of revolutionary resistance in Guatemala, Guevara had had to leave for Mexico – which at that time, with its revolutionary history, was a gathering point for left-wing Latin American exiles. Being short of money, he struggled along as street photographer and seller of books and toys, before finding work as a specialist in allergic diseases in Mexico City’s central hospital. One day Nico López showed up there, with the ailing Raúl Castro in tow. López, who had commanded the attack on Bayamó during the Moncada episode and managed to escape capture, had already met and befriended Guevara in 1954 in Guatemala. López and Raúl now invited Che to meet Fidel – something he himself had had in mind since 1953, when he had listened in Central American cafés to the story of his epic challenge to Batista.

  On the evening of July 8, 1955, the day after Fidel Castro’s arrival in Mexico City, the two men met in Calle Empéran at the house of María Antonia González, a friend of Fidel’s and Raúl’s from Cuba.27 It was to be a historic encounter: Fidel Castro, the daring figure with a natural talent for politics and the aura of a battle-tried revolutionary, always at the center of things, determined, energetic and confident of victory; and the quieter Che Guevara, more reserved and physically less robust, but equally self-assured and resolute.

  They immediately felt a great sympathy with each other – even if they were not yet on the same wavelength ideologically. Years later Castro noted that at that time Che’s “revolutionary development was more advanced than mine, ideologically speaking. From a theoretical point of view, he had a better background, he was more advanced as a revolutionary.”28 Their encounter in the Old Town of the Mexican capital was the beginning of a close friendship and a common political fate, in which Che, as chief ideologue, became the powerful number two in Cuba and decisively influenced the orientation of the revolution.

  In his travel diary, Che observed: “I met Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary. He is a young, intelligent guy, very sure of himself and extraordinarily audacious. We hit it off well.”29 The meeting finally offered him the perspective in life for which he had been searching: “After a few hours – by dawn – I had already embarked on the future expedition.… Fidel impressed me as an extraordinary man. He faced and resolved the most impossible things.… I shared in his optimism.”30

  The Calle Empéran apartment was rapidly built up into a kind of headquarters and information center for the fidelistas. On August 2, Castro wrote to his half-sister that his life in exile was “sad, lonely and hard.” He also had a bout of ‘flu: “My whole body aches. I have no Cuban cigars, and I really miss them.”31 To build and arm a guerrilla force required money – and he was virtually penniless. And on July 24 he wrote to Melba Hernández: “I had to pawn my coat to be able to bring out the first manifesto” [of the 26th of July Movement] by August 8.32 In the end, he decided to turn to where Martí had found the means for his landing in the struggle for independence: to the Cuban exiles in the United States.

  He even had to borrow the money for a train ticket, but on October 12 he set off through Texas and stayed for two months. After stops in Philadelphia, Union City (New Jersey), and Bridgeport (Connecticut), he arrived on October 23 in New York and then moved on to Miami, Tampa, and Key West. He addressed fund-raising rallies in each place, and set up a chain of “patriotic clubs” and “M-26-7 clubs” to support the movement. His most spectacular performances were on October 30, before an audience of 800 at the Palm Garden Hall, New York, and on November 20 before 1,000 invited guests at the Flagler Theater in Miami. Always elegantly dressed, in a grey three-piece suit and a striped tie, he presented himself as “following in Martí’s footsteps” and promised: “I can inform you with complete certainty that in 1956 we will be free or we will be martyrs!”33 After all expenses had been paid, he came away with 9,000 dollars; the clubs of sympathizers would later play a major role in funding and supplying the guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra, and he also received money and weapons from Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. But there were limits to what could be raised outside the country. Back in Cuba, many businessmen paid “revolutionary taxes,” as a precaution in case the guerrillas were triumphant. The chairman of the Bacardi Rum Company, José M. Pepin Bosch y Lamarque, is said to have alone disbursed a million dollars into the coffers of the revolution.34 That was still some way off, however. After his return to Mexico on December 10, the FBI opened a file on his activities in the United States and began to infiltrate the solidarity clubs.35

  Stormy crossing on the Granma

  In a manifesto published in Bohemia on March 19, 1956, Castro declared that his “26th of July Movement” was the only “revolutionary opposition of ordinary people, by ordinary people and for ordinary people,” and the true heir of Eddy Chibás, the founder of the Orthodox Party.36 Fresh support came from the Directorio Revolucionario (DR) led by the 24-year-old president of the FEU student federation, José Antonio Echeverría. On August 30, 1956, he and Castro signed a joint declaration in Mexico, undertaking to organize sabotage and other armed operations in Cuba that would create the revolutionary climate for an invasion and to coordinate all their further actions. Castro thought that this would keep a potential rival on a tight rein, but he was mistaken. For Echevarría soon tried to improve his position by organizing operations on his own initiative, and the following spring, when he staged a spectacular action to precipitate the downfall of Batista, he paid for his rashness with his life.

  Other forces were at work in Cuba while Castro’s people in Mexico practiced shooting and his supporters stirred up the island with attacks and protest actions. Early in April 1956, a small group of young army officers banded together in an anti-Batista conspiracy around Colonel Ramón Barquín; these puros, as they called themselves, were part of the establishment and stood close to the Orthodox Party. But their plans were betrayed, and Barquín was imprisoned on the Isle of Pines until the fall of Batista.

  As Castro made no secret of his goals, the dictator did his best to forestall him. An agent of his army secret service, the SIM, traveled to Mexico and offered a reward of US20,000 for some killers to dress in police uniform, arrest Castro and make him disappear. But Castro was tipped off, and the operation was eventually cancelled.

  On June 20, 1956, however, the Mexican police suddenly detained Castro and his bodyguards, Universo Sánchez and Ramiro Valdés (later to be security chief after the revolution), after a spy had betrayed the whole logistical side of the organization, including its hideout and training camp on a farm outside Mexico City. On June 24, 28 rebels landed in jail, and Castro found himself accused of organizing a Communist conspiracy. Immediately he fired off an article from his prison cell, which was published in Bohemia in mid-July: />
  Naturally the accusation of my being a Communist was absurd in the eyes of all who knew my public path in Cuba, without any kind of ties with the Communist Party.… What moral authority, on the other hand, does Mr Batista have to speak of communism when he was the Communist Party presidential candidate in the elections of 1940, if his electoral posters took shelter under the hammer and sickle, … if half a dozen of his present ministers and trusted collaborators were well-known members of the Communist Party?37

  Thanks to great efforts on the part of Mexican and Cuban friends, and the support of sympathetic lawyers and Mexico’s liberal former president, Lázaro Cárdenas, members of Castro’s group were released in batches towards the end of July. But with Mexico no longer safe, time was pressing. Not only his widely known promise (to land in Cuba by the end of the year), but also the political acrimony of Echeverría and others inside the country, were impelling him to force the pace.

  Then something unforeseeable distracted him: a woman threw his revolutionary plans into confusion. While he and his friends were in jail, Teresa “Teté” Casuso, a well-educated, attractive Cuban blonde and widow of the writer Pablo de la Torriente Brau who had been killed in the Spanish Civil War, read about them in a newspaper and showed up to ask for their help. She was accompanied by another Cuban, Isabel Custodio, a tall, exceptionally beautiful girl of about 18 who was staying with her at the time. In Teresa Casuso’s words, the young woman “looked like an elegant model, with the rims of her enormous, innocent, greenish-brown eyes darkly accented in what she called the Italian fashion. On that day, her hair was its natural color of dark gold.”38

  Teresa Casuso remembers first seeing the crowd of men in the prison courtyard.

  In the middle, tall and clean-shaven with close-cropped chestnut hair, dressed soberly and correctly in a brown suit, standing out from the rest by his look and his bearing, was their chief, Fidel Castro. He gave one the impression of being noble, sure, deliberate – like a big Newfoundland dog.… He looked eminently serene, and inspired confidence and a sense of security.39

  Continually glancing at Isabel Custodio out of the corner of his eye, he let Teresa Casuso know how honored he was by their visit. At the end, he and his men sang the Cuban national anthem for the two women.

  After their release, Castro’s attention turned in more senses than one to “Teté” Casuso’s apartment, where he went not only to stash away weapons but always also to meet the young Isabel. His comrades now got to know a completely new side of their 29-year-old leader, who had fallen head over heels in love. Soon a passionate affair was developing between them: they seemed inseparable; he bought her little presents, new clothes, shoes, a large bottle of French perfume, and – because he disliked her all-too-revealing bikini – an old-fashioned bathing costume. Although he would have known that he was making himself “vulnerable” – since a “true revolutionary” had to give himself body and soul to the revolution – he treated her “like a princess,” with tenderness and sensitivity, “just as a man should” (to quote her own words).40

  After two months, he finally proposed to her and tried to obtain her parents’ consent. But although at first she was willing enough, the relationship broke down soon afterwards, apparently because he wanted to make her a revolutionary and take her with him to Cuba. “The idea of going on the boat with him,” she recalled, “was a subject of dispute because I would be the only woman.… It was a very difficult break. I left. I can’t say why.”41 She immediately went on to marry a Mexican businessman and former boyfriend. Castro was visibly disappointed, and one day when Teresa Casuso came across him assembling a machine pistol, he said to her that the revolution was also a “beautiful fiancée.”42 Teresa Casuso, for her part, long remained close to Castro and later worked for the Cuban diplomatic service.

  In the second half of October, just a few days after another meeting between Castro and Echeverría, two of the latter’s close comrades from the Directorio Revolucionario shot the head of Cuban military intelligence, Colonel Manuel Blanco Río, as he was leaving a night club in Havana. One of the two assassins was Rolando Cubela, a man who in the sixties would be hired by the CIA to murder Fidel Castro.

  Since the revolutionaries were still without a ship, or money to buy one, Castro at last seemed disposed to make a pact with the devil. In late September, having swum the Río Grande unnoticed, he met in the small Texan town of McAllen none other than Cuban ex-President Prío, who placed the sum of 100,000 dollars at Castro’s disposal in the hope of regaining power.43 In October, Castro finally got his hands on a boat, using the services of his Mexican arms supplier. It was the Granma (“Grandmother”), then lying in a harbor near Tuxpán, whose external appearance was thoroughly in keeping with its name. He paid US17,000 for the ramshackle wooden yacht, which had belonged to Robert B. Erickson (an American living in Mexico) and was badly in need of repair, plus another 2,000 for the use of a shed in which the rebels could prepare their sea journey.

  On November 21, the Mexican authorities gave Castro and his men three days to leave the country, while the police seized the store of weapons in Teresa Casuso’s house and placed her under temporary arrest. Castro lost no time before he gave his marching orders. The men moved at once from their hiding places to the perfunctorily repaired “landing craft,” and loaded it with food, water, and matériel: that is, 35 rifles with telescopic sights, 55 Mexican rifles, three Thompson submachine guns and 40 light machine pistols, as well as two attack guns and boxes of ammunition.44 On November 25, 1956, at 1.30 in the morning, the 21 by 5 meter Granma finally slipped, with navigation lights dimmed, out of the little port of Poza Rica near Tuxpán de Pantepéc. On board the former leisure boat, built way back in 1938 for a maximum of 25 persons, 82 guerrillas (50 having been left behind for lack of space45) now pitched and tossed in a stormy, rainy night as the two six-cylinder 250-PS diesel engines carried them the 1,235 nautical miles to their uncertain goal: the Cuban Revolution. As they entered the Gulf of Mexico, the men struck up the Cuban national anthem in defiance of the lashing waves, before sinking, like sardines squashed together in a tin, into long days and nights of sea-sickness.46

  It was little short of a miracle, down more to luck than seamanship, that the Granma reached anywhere at all. For seven days (two more than planned), riding only just above the waterline, the overloaded boat had to contend with unrelenting bad weather and stormy seas. One engine broke down, the men had to bale out water, and after five days there was nothing left to eat or drink. The landing itself was considerably less smooth than Martí’s 60 years before, as the Granma ran out of fuel around four o’clock on the morning of December 2. The boat eventually ran aground before the mangrove swamps of Los Cayuelos on the south coast of Oriente Province, some 60 yards from shore and miles short of the target beach at Las Coloradas. “It wasn’t a landing, it was a shipwreck,” said Juan Manuel Márquez (Castro’s deputy, soon to be captured and killed by Batista’s troops).47

  In the end, most of the equipment had to be left behind. Hungry, thirsty and weak, completely exhausted, the men had to make incredible efforts, often up to their chins in marshy water, to struggle through the mangrove tangle to reach dry land. Then, as daybreak came, spotter planes flew overhead. In an interview a fortnight earlier with the pro-government paper Alerta, Castro had sent a message to Batista: “We strongly reaffirm the promise we made for the year 1956: We will be free men or martyrs.”48 And so, they found a large military force awaiting them. No sooner did they have solid ground beneath their feet than days of hide-and-seek began.

  Only when they had reached the 90-mile long by 30-mile wide chain of the Sierra Maestra, with its thick, almost impenetrable rainforest, did Castro and his men feel some degree of safety. After three days, at noon on December 5, an army patrol surprised them near Alegría del Pío and opened fire. A peasant met en route, as well as some carelessly discarded scraps of sugarcane, had given them away. It was nearly the end: some of Castro’s people fell; Che
Guevara was badly wounded in the shoulder and lost a lot of blood. For days the army kept up the chase, pursuing them with incendiary bombs through the sugar plantations.

  “Our group was completely dispersed,” Castro later said. “I had two men and two rifles with me.”49 He did not know where the others were, or even whether any of them had survived. The 30-year-old leader, together with his bodyguard Universo Sánchez and doctor Faustino Pérez, both aged 36, lay for five days in a cane field without stirring. There was only one thing Castro could not refrain from doing: he talked and talked – in whispers. Despite their seemingly hopeless situation, Faustino Pérez recalled, “speaking with the enthusiasm that characterizes him, Fidel told us his future plans. But not only plans for the future … about organizing the country, about the people of Cuba, the history of Cuba, the future of Cuba. And about the necessity of launching a revolution, a real revolution.” Sánchez, a simple farmer, said to himself at one point: “Shit, he’s gone crazy.”50 He could not believe they would be alive for much longer.

  A guerrillero in the Sierra Maestra

  During the days of pursuit, Castro lost three-quarters of his guerrilla force: 61 men. On December 16, he and his two companions finally reached the rendezvous at the farm of Ramón “Mongo” Pérez, in a hard-to-reach area on the western slopes of the Sierra Maestra. When Raúl and four more men showed up a couple of days later, Fidel Castro amazed everyone with the assurance: “We’ll win this war. We are just beginning to fight.”51 Next to arrive was a group of eight, including Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and Juan Almeida, so that for Christmas 1956 there were 16 of them. Over the next few days, another five found their way back. Around New Year, when they entered the mountains, 21 of the original 82 had made it – to which eight farmers from the surrounding area added themselves. Their meager weaponry seemed better suited for a hunting party than a revolution.