by Tad Szulc
Assisting Miret in training the rebels was a U.S. Army veteran from the Korean War named Isaac Santos, known as "Professor Harriman" to the volunteers. It was Castro who discovered Harriman at a friend's house, learning that he had been instructing another anti-Batista faction, and that he was an expert in hand-to-hand combat. Harriman ran a tough commando course, and he taught the Fidelistas how to use a compass and orient themselves in any terrain. Eventually, however, the rebels suspected him of being an American intelligence plant, and he was eased out before Moncada. He was seen in a Batista prison in 1953, exhibiting signs of torture, suggesting that the judgment of treachery may have been an unjust one.
When the Martí centennial came in January 1953, Fidel Castro already had a "rebel army" of sorts, and he decided to show it off, a risky gesture, but for him a typical one. To compete with the Batista celebration at the National Capitol on the night of January 27, university students' organizations, the new youths' rights committee, the women's civic front, high-school groups, and young workers planned a huge torchlight parade across Havana, and this is where the Fidelistas chose to present themselves to the country.
They did so by fielding a five-hundred-member contingent that marched in the parade in military formation behind Fidel Castro, chanting, "Revolution! . . . Revolution! . . . Revolution! . . ." The flaming torches they carried in their hands were armed with large, pointed iron nails at the top to be used as lethal weapons in the event of an attack by the riot police. The Fidelistas had spent all morning constructing the nail torches at Calixto García Hospital and at the university stadium. Late in the afternoon, Abel Santamaría and José Luís Tasende organized the rebels into marching units; when night fell, Castro appeared to assume command of his troops and joined the parade of thousands of torches. Raúl Castro marched behind his brother, as did Melba Hernández and Haydée Santamaría, the two women founders of the Movement, and most of the general staff.
Presumably because of the presence in Havana of distinguished foreign guests, the regime did not interfere with the parade; the police made no move to halt the parade, ignoring the chants of "Revolution" and "Liberty," and there was no violence. The next morning, the actual Martí anniversary day, thousands of youths paraded again through Havana, this time from the university to Martí's monument in Central Park, and again Fidel led his perfectly drilled units, the men marching arm in arm. Melba Hernández recalls that the Fidelistas' martial appearance caused a "sensation," but she also heard people in the streets saying, "Here come the Communists." At the same time neither the crowds nor the authorities seemed to realize that the highly disciplined detachments marching behind Castro in the two successive parades were actually under his command, that they belonged to an organized movement, and that they had military training.
There is no rational explanation for Fidel and his associates' decision to participate in the Martí parades as a large group that could so easily be identified by the police and the SIM as a revolutionary organization, thereby inviting its own destruction. It threatened all the painstaking security measures taken over long months to prevent the Movement's public identification with Castro, and it is a mystery how the secret police failed to draw the obvious conclusions from the spectacle of Fidel marching at the head of his columns.
Though it certainly was the bravado on which Castro thrives, he may also have calculated that the Batista regime, unaware of the Movement's existence, would think nothing of the presence of Fidel and his friends among the parading protesters. The temptation to flex muscles in public for the first time may have been too great to resist. Asked about the risks, Pedro Miret says that "we were certain that nobody would know who we were," and that at the time the government saw only the traditional political parties as enemies: "We were nothing to them, we did not exist." Besides, Miret says, the plotters held the authorities' professional competence in low esteem.
Castro remained in public view during most of February, although he and his closest associates were already actively engaged in preparing targets for military revolutionary action. On February 8, Castro published in the mass-circulation weekly Bohemia an article denouncing the destruction by the police of the studio of the Havana sculptor Manuel Fidalgo. Among the works destroyed were small busts of Martí with the inscription "For Cuba That Suffers" (a Martí quotation) and death masks of Senator Chibás. Fidalgo sold most of his works to raise funds for Castro's Movement, and Fidel made the sculptor's unexplained disappearance after the police raid sound ominous. He wrote an article that was printed with pictures taken by Fernando Chenard, a professional photographer who came to the Movement from the Communist party. It was the first time since the Batista coup that the Cuban press published an article signed by Castro.
On February 13, Rubén Batista Rubio, the youth shot by the police during the Mella statue disturbances the month before, died at a Havana hospital, and this triggered another protest. Castro, who had been at his bedside almost every day, helped lead some thirty thousand persons in a silent funeral procession from the university to the cemetery on February 14. Riots broke out all over Havana after the burial, automobiles were set ablaze, and the police fired on the students. The next day, formal charges of promoting "public disturbances" were lodged by the secret police against "Doctor Fidel Castro," who was described as an Ortodoxo youth leader. The government eventually dropped the case without bringing it to trial.
There were more disturbances in Havana in February and March, including some on the first anniversary of the Batista takeover, but Castro and his Movement concentrated almost entirely on military preparations. Mario Mencía, the historian of the Cuban revolution, believes that after the events of February 14, Castro had made a "tactical change" in the revolutionary movement. During the first year, he writes, the nascent Movement took advantage of every opportunity to defy the Batista regime publicly. In the second year, however, Castro's policy shifted to the avoidance of any situations that would interfere with the Movement's principal goal of direct action. Mencía observes that this "revolutionary agitator" knew how to adjust phases of his Movement to changing circumstances.
For these reasons Castro remained neutral when another anti-Batista faction attempted to overthrow the regime through a civilian-military coup. The MNR, the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, had been organized the previous year by Rafael García Bárcena, a liberal university professor with links to young army officers. Drawing its following from among middle-class students, intellectuals, and professionals, it had no pronounced ideological tendencies. Its ranks included, however, a number of young lawyers, doctors, and other professionals who later joined Castro in the 26th of July Movement. García Bárcena's concept was to lead about fifty men, armed with pistols and knives and daggers, on the army's Camp Columbia in Havana and to seize it with the support of pro-MNR officers inside the installation. Then, the professor believed, a popular uprising would follow and Batista would fall. Even with a conspiratorial bias, this was a very unconvincing plan, depending as it did on the improbable success of an attack by a small group of civilians on Cuba's largest military base, and on the ability of a handful of young officers to assume command of the troops.
Castro was aware of this enterprise, planned initially for March 8, then postponed to April 5, and considered it pure adventurism. The idea of organizing an army, seizing the barracks, and ousting Batista in twenty-four hours "seemed absurd." When Professor Bárcena outlined his plot and asked for his backing early that spring, Castro conveyed these views.
Subsequently, Castro was accused of fearing García Bárcena as a rival. But discussing it on another occasion, Fidel said he had told the professor that he was willing to "analyze" the plan with him, and that he had enough men and weapons to participate in such an action if it had a chance of success. However, he felt that the MNR leaders must halt immediately their plot discussions with every politician on the island. García Bárcena ignored this advice, and Castro remarked later that the conspiracy had to f
ail because "it was the most advertised action in the history of Cuba," and consequently the Movement could not risk becoming involved.
There were, of course, deep ideological differences between the two leaders, revolving around such issues as the concept of the class struggle. The professor was against it, and Castro claims that as a Marxist he already believed in it at the time. It is entirely possible that Fidel simply would not subordinate his ideas to a "bourgeois"-minded leader. Moreover, Castro demanded the destruction of the existing army along with Batista's overthrow, while García Bárcena had wanted an alliance with the military establishment. In the end, however, the whole argument became academic because the MNR was betrayed from inside its ranks (as Castro had warned), and on Easter Sunday morning, April 5, the police raided the house in Havana where García Bárcena and his followers were preparing to launch their coup three hours later.
Seventy persons were arrested in the MNR's revolutionary fiasco, and fourteen were tried for subversion in a trial lasting nearly two months, attracting great public attention. García Bárcena, defended by the young lawyer Armando Hart (who was a MNR member but was not arrested), was sentenced to a two-year prison term. There were more disturbances in the streets of Havana and other cities, but General Batista appeared satisfied that the only existing threat to his rule had been removed.
By the same token, Batista experienced no fears over the "Montreal Pact," signed in a Canadian hotel on June 2 by leaders of the internally divided traditional political parties, proposing his removal and the return to constitutional government. The pact failed to issue any call for armed rebellion against Batista, but concerns developed within the Movement's leadership that whatever funds were available to Cubans abroad for purchasing arms would flow to the followers of the political parties on the island rather than to the Fidelistas. According to one published version, Castro had agreed to be a regional coordinator for an armed uprising financed by the Montreal group under the overall command of Juan Manuel Márquez, an Ortodoxo politician in Havana, but this would have been a wholly implausible role for Fidel. Later, Márquez became one of Castro's closest companions (and one of the first to die after the Granma landing in 1956).
These Cuban revolutionaries of distinct allegiances and tendencies at home and abroad were entirely consumed by domestic politics, hardly aware of great world events. Though Cuban students had opposed the United States over the Korean War in 1950 and 195 1 (Castro being among the most outspoken critics of American policies), they seemed to have lost interest in it now that the armistice was approaching. On March 5, 1953, Josef Stalin died at the Kremlin, but there is no record of any reaction to it among the "old" Cuban Communists or among the self-proclaimed young Marxists such as Fidel Castro.
And the only interest the United States had in Cuba at that juncture was to announce publicly its support for Batista's proposal to revise the 1943 electoral code (Batista periodically talked about elections) so that, in effect, the Communists under any disguise would be kept out of any future elections. But Washington failed to use this opportunity to insist that Batista actually set an election date; the assumption was that the Havana regime was firmly in control, and nobody had any idea that Fidel Castro and his Movement even existed.
At the start of Easter Week, Fidel Castro motored to Oriente, stopping briefly in Santiago, Palma Soriano, and several other spots. This was a perfectly normal holiday trip for a Havana lawyer whose family home was in Oriente, and there was no reason for anyone to suspect that Castro was actually surveying the terrain for the armed blow at Batista. In truth, Fidel had selected this particular week for travel because he knew that García Bárcena's conspiracy was planned to erupt on Easter Sunday, and he wanted the whole Movement leadership to be away from Havana. Abel and Haydée Santamaría took Melba Hernández to their native Las Villas province, and Jesús Montané went to see his parents on the Isle of Pines.
The idea of seizing an army base through an attack by several hundred armed men was devised by Fidel late in 1952, when Pedro Miret had completed the first stage of the volunteers' military training. He had settled on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago, Cuba's second largest military installation, sometime between January and March 1953. Driving through the city of Pinar del Río on one of his recruiting trips late in 1952, Castro pointed to the army barracks and asked his companion, José Suárez Blanco, "What do you think of this?" Suárez, who understood the question, but also knew how limited were the Movement's resources, replied, "Nobody can get in there."
The dilemma facing Castro was that he could not start a revolution without arms, and that the Movement had no access to funds to purchase them. Fidel could barely make ends meet to support himself and his family; they were essentially subsidized by friends in the Movement. As there was no real source of money for this secret organization in Cuba or any prospects abroad, Castro concluded easily that if they could not buy arms, they had to grab them. In a pep talk to his companions in the first weeks of January 1953, Fidel summed it up: "But there are places where there are more than fifty M-1s; there are places where there are one thousand oiled rifles, well-kept rifles. . . . There is no need to buy them, there is no need to bring them, there is no need to oil them, there is no need to do anything; the only thing that needs to be done is to capture them . . ."
The risk involved was once again overridden by Castro's self-confidence. The idea of attacking Moncada in Santiago would serve two purposes: as a means of obtaining quantities of modern weapons and as a major military base to become a center around which a national revolution would grow. Castro was able to remind his companions that the Cuban armies in the independence wars started out as guerrillas, equipping themselves with weapons obtained from assaults on Spanish fortresses. During the uprising in Bogotá in 1948, too, crowds had obtained weapons from police stations they attacked.
Castro's studies of military strategy included Chronicles of the War of Cuba by General José Miró Argenter, and the Campaign Diary by Máximo Gómez, the generalissimo of the pro-independence forces. When three shiploads of arms for the Cubans were confiscated by the United States, Gómez wrote José Martí not to worry because he would take arms away from the Spaniards. Fidel was likewise impressed with Ernest Hemingway's fictional account of Spanish Republican guerrillas fighting the well-equipped Nationalists and grabbing their weapons, going as far as to tell American visitors that he learned guerrilla warfare from For Whom the Bell Tolls (strangely, he made no effort to become acquainted with Hemingway, who resided permanently on the outskirts of Havana until shortly before his death). According to Alfredo Guevara, he visited the Communist party's bookstore to buy works on Soviet Army campaigns in World War II (which included much irregular warfare by the Russians). Castro is not known to have sought familiarity with guerrilla writings by Mao Zedong, or Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh or General Giap.
In a 1966 speech, Castro explained the military aspects of his Moncada strategy: "We did not expect to defeat the Batista tyranny, to defeat its armies, with our handful of men. But we did think that this handful of men could seize the first arms to begin arming the people; we knew that a handful of men would be sufficient not to defeat that regime, but to unleash that force, that immense energy of the people that, yes, was capable of defeating that regime." The central political aspect of the Castro strategy, he described, was a rejection of the traditional notion that "revolutions can be made with the army or without the army, but never against the army." Nobody in those days, Castro said, would even think of a revolution against the army, yet his entire philosophy reposed on the belief that the army must be destroyed to clear the ground for a "real" revolution. Castro's master plan, then, called for the capture of arms by his revolutionary "handful" in order to defeat the Batista regime and destroy its army, and then proceed to implant the great revolution.
For reasons that Castro describes as "accidental," the Moncada assault failed. He has never accepted intellectually the possibility that his concept or plann
ing might have been faulty. Moreover, it will never be known if the great revolution would indeed have leaped ahead with the capture of the barracks. This is a fundamental question concerning the validity of Castro's initial revolutionary strategy. Castro evidently believed that favorable conditions already existed in Cuba so that Moncada could trigger a nationwide rebellion, but in retrospect this was not necessarily a correct assessment. Besides, it was doubtful that Batista would be deserted by the bulk of the armed forces even if Moncada fell, and therefore Castro would have had to fight for survival against the dictator's superior firepower. Ironically, his defeat combined with his spectacularly defiant stance afterward, helped create a revolutionary climate on the island with the birth of the 26th of July Movement. When he launched the Sierra war three years later, the revolutionary conditions had come into being, making the Castro enterprise much more plausible. Speaking in general terms long after the fact, Castro declared that "it is an error to think that [revolutionary] conscience must come first, then the struggle." On the contrary, he said, "the struggle must come first and, inevitably, behind the struggle will come with rising impetus the revolutionary conscience." This has worked for Castro in an exceptional fashion during and after the Sierra war, and in the context of a changed strategy, but it might have failed if he had found himself sitting inside Moncada with his handful of men with no adequate conscience and support in the country at large. The Castro strategy ran totally counter to Marxist-Leninist theories, which is why the Communists refused to support him for such a long time, and ultimately he triumphed on the strength of an incredible series of gambles and his unparalleled self-confidence.
At his trial after the assault, Castro explained that he had expected to take Moncada by surprise and without any bloodshed, in part because he did not think the government had ever anticipated an attack in Santiago; the coup tradition was to try to seize Camp Columbia in Havana. Asked by the prosecutor what he had proposed to do if he had captured Moncada, Fidel said: "We only counted on our own efforts and the help of all the people of Cuba, which we would have obtained if we could have communicated with it by radio. . . . The people would have responded with firmness if we had succeeded in putting ourselves in contact with it. Our plan consisted of taking Moncada and then broadcasting the last speech of [Senator] Chibás over all the radio stations of the city. We would have read our revolutionary program to the people of Cuba; our declaration of principles touched on all the aspirations of generations of Cubans. At that time, all the opposition leaders would have supported us, joining the Movement throughout the republic. With the entire nation united, we would have overthrown the regime . . ."
