by Tad Szulc
Even though the specific mission had never been discussed during the long months of preparations, there were vastly more volunteers than equipment to arm them. Finally, Fidel and the military committee determined that 135 attackers would be required for Moncada and 30 for Bayamo, and the chiefs of the individual cells were ordered to select their best men to meet the necessary numbers. The volunteers were told only to bring casual clothes for an extended absence.
The Wednesday before the attack, Castro had supervised the drafting by the poet Raúl Gómez García of the Moncada Manifesto that was to be issued to the nation when the rebels attacked in Santiago and Bayamo. Late that day, Fidel went to the apartment of his friend Naty Revuelta in Vedado. There, he gave her the text of the Manifesto to retype and make a number of copies for him to take along to Santiago and for her to distribute to principal political leaders and editors in Havana the moment he seized Moncada.
Naty, the green-eyed blonde who had been devoting most of her time to Fidel's cause, had already selected and purchased the records that the revolutionaries planned to play in their moment of victory over Santiago radio stations: the Cuban national anthem, independence war hymns, Chopin's triumphant A-Major Polonaise and Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. The great sound of patriotism and revolution, the blood-quickening music, the Chibás farewell speech, the appeal for the creation of armed people's militias, and the Manifesto would be the spark for the national uprising against Batista. First, the Manifesto, signed by "The Cuban Revolution," invoked the memory of José Martí, charging that the "true revolution" ignited by him and continued by subsequent generations had been undermined by Batista's "treacherous coup" to bring "the crimes of blood, dishonor, unlimited lust, and theft of the national treasury." It then proclaimed that "before the chaos into which the nation has fallen, the determination of the tyrant, and the godless interests of the men who support him, the youth of Cuba who love freedom and man's dignity stand up in a gesture of immortal rebellion, breaking the insane pact made with past corruption and present deceit."
In the document Castro offered Cuba a nine-point program, in which the first point stated that "The Revolution declares itself free from the shackles of the foreign nations." This sense of priorities presumably conveyed his nationalism (if not his anti-Americanism), but it also was the nationalism of his generation, and no Marxist connotations should be read into it. If nothing else, Castro himself insists that at that stage he carefully concealed his Marxism. The Manifesto also called for "definitive social justice" and "respect for workers and students," but such phrases had been employed by Cuban politicians for a half-century. In terms of representative democracy (meaning democratic elections), Castro declared the "Revolution's . . . absolute and reverent respect for the Constitution of 1940," which Batista had suspended with his 1952 coup. In other words, the Moncada Manifesto was hardly a call to the barricades, and in retrospect one might even wonder whether it would have been sufficient to set the country aflame.
In any event, Castro was confident that he and the young poet had produced an inspiring text, and one of his important errands on his last day in Havana on Friday, July 24, was to pick up the retyped copies of the Manifesto from Naty Revuelta. With Teodulio Mitchel driving him, Fidel started the day meeting Movement members at the Santamarías' and Melba Hernández's parents' apartments for quick conferences. Next, he rushed to the southeast suburbs to pick up two platoon leaders, to the vicinity of the airport to locate a cell chief, to Santiago de las Vegas for the same purpose. Back in Havana, Castro stopped again at the Santamarías' home to pick up extra arms, and at his sister Lidia's apartment to hand instructions to a group just arrived from Artemisa. Tauntingly, he also visited the secret-police headquarters to inquire about a "client," on the theory that he would sense if there were suspicions about him.
When night fell, Fidel was racing again along the airport route to contact an aviation radio specialist whose services he required in Santiago. Except for catnaps, he had not slept at all and had eaten virtually nothing in the past forty-eight hours, too busy and too charged up to be able to relax. Because the blue Buick ignored a stop sign, Castro and Mitchel were stopped by a police cruiser and fined on the spot after Fidel calmly informed the policemen that they were en route to the airport to meet family members. Had the highway patrolmen decided to take them to a police station, which was often done in such traffic cases, Fidel's revolution might have been thrown completely off schedule. He always seemed to live on the brink.
Returning to the city, Castro met briefly at a bar with the dentist from Palma Soriano, then drove two blocks to his own apartment. There, he told Mitchel that he was going upstairs "to kiss my son . . . God only knows when I'll be able to do it again." A photograph in official Cuban archives shows Castro with Fidelito, then nearly four years old, pointing at something in the distance with his extended right arm and index finger, his son appearing pleased and amused. Castro wears a suit and a tie, there is a handkerchief in his breast pocket, and, shot from profile, he looks the role of a Latin matinée idol. The caption says that in the picture Fidel is saying good-bye to his son, but it seems too posed, and one suspects that the photograph may have been taken for future historical purposes.
Castro is not known to have said anything to Mitchel about taking leave from his wife, and it is extremely unlikely that he gave Mirta the slightest indication of his plans or of the reason for kissing his son good-bye. Again, she remains the unseen figure in the Castro family drama. At the apartment, Fidel put on a white guayabera (presumably having changed from the suit which he wore in the picture), and as one of his friends said later, his only baggage for the trip was an extra guayabera and a volume of selected works of Lenin.
Castro's last stop was Naty Revuelta's apartment on Eleventh Street in Vedado to pick up the original and several copies of the Manifesto as well as the records she had bought for the planned revolutionary broadcast from Santiago. Under the circumstances, Naty was the only person not in the top leadership of the Movement to have advance knowledge of the Moncada attack: Not only had she obtained the records and typed the Manifesto, but now Fidel instructed her to hand-deliver copies to the heads of the Ortodoxo party, including Raúl Chibás, the brother of the late Senator Chibás, and the publishers of the weekly Bohemia and two main daily newspapers. Naty was to take the Manifesto to their homes at five o'clock in the morning of Sunday, July 26. Then, Fidel said good-bye to Naty.
It was already late in the evening when Castro and Mitchel finally took the central highway that runs east from Havana to Oriente. In Matanzas two hours later, they happened to come across another Movement automobile, and Castro chatted for a few minutes with its occupants. He repeated the warning that he had given earlier to all the drivers to observe the speed limit to avoid being stopped by the police (but that he himself had forgotten), and the blue Buick headed for Colón, where they stopped at the home of Dr. Mario Muñoz. The physician was preparing to leave for Santiago to join the assault teams.
Castro and Mitchel had breakfast early in the morning in El Cobre, then stopped in Santa Clara, the provincial capital of Las Villas, to find an optician. Fidel, who always remembered everything, had left his glasses behind in Havana at Melba Hernández's apartment, and being quite near-sighted, he did not want to lead the attack on Moncada half-blind (in those days, he seldom wore his glasses in public). Although it was Saturday, the optician made a pair for Fidel while he waited.
They reached Bayamo around six o'clock in the evening of Saturday, July 25, and Castro went to the Gran Casino inn to talk with the twenty-five men who were to attack the army barracks the next dawn. They had arrived in groups by train and automobile earlier in the day, and Fidel reviewed with them all the details of the battle plan. After leaving Bayamo at 10.00 P.M., the Buick was stopped at an army checkpoint near Palma Soriano. This was where Teodulio Mitchel proved his real value. When a soldier approached the car to check the passengers' documents and search the trunk, Mitchel r
ecognized him as a friend from their hometown, greeting him by name. "Is that you, Mitchel?" the soldier said. "Go ahead . . ."
At midnight, Castro and Mitchel arrived in Santiago, in the midst of wild celebrations of annual Oriente carnival. In Cuba, carnival is in July, and Santiago was always famous for its music and dancing in the streets, day and night, from Friday until Sunday night. It was for this reason that Fidel had chosen the dawn of Sunday, July 26, for the attack. He assumed correctly that most of the garrison would be away from Moncada on weekend passes, and that the guard would be lax. This strategy, too, may have come from Martí, as he had chosen Sunday, February 24, 1895, to launch the anti-Spain uprising because it was pre-Lent carnival.
The two men had coffee in a shop downtown, and drove on to Siboney. The farmhouse was completely dark, and the blue Buick was challenged by Jesús Montané, who stood guard in the shadows. Inside, Fidel found 118 men of his Rebel Army plus Melba and Haydée. Most of the men had gathered at the farm in the course of the afternoon, coming directly from Havana via Santiago or after an overnight stop there, and they were exhausted from lack of sleep and the heat. Melba and Haydée, who earlier had fixed a chicken-with-rice meal for the men, ironed the 120 army uniforms for the Fidelistas; they were in the only room with a light.
Abel Santamaría briefed Castro on the state of readiness, and Fidel insisted on returning to Santiago at two o'clock in the morning for one final mission. Abel went with him as some of the men at the farm tried fitful sleep, or just chatted in low voices and smoked. In the early evening, weapons had been brought out from dry wells on the property where they had been hidden; the automobiles were concealed inside specially built wooden chicken runs. Fidel's foray to Santiago was to find Luis Conte Agüero, a well-known radio commentator and Ortodoxo politician who had a house in the capital of Oriente; he wanted to tell him about the impending assault and persuade him to coordinate the revolutionary broadcasts. However, Conte Agüero had stayed in Havana that weekend, and the disappointed Fidel was back at El Siboney at 3:00 A.M. It was his fourth consecutive night without sleep, but he was bursting with energy and anticipation.
Additional men arrived, and the final count was 131 fighters, including Dr. Muñoz, Melba and Haydée, and Fidel himself. Castro ordered the men to change into light-brown army uniforms, suddenly discovering that even the largest uniform available was too small for him. He inspected himself worriedly in a mirror in the half-dark room, concerned that he might not look convincingly soldierlike at the moment of attack—a potential security problem.
Though detailed plans had been worked out beforehand, Castro discovered at El Siboney that Abel Santamaría, whom he had not seen in long weeks, insisted on leading the main assault group instead of letting Fidel do it. The original plan had been for Castro to attack the fortress itself while Lester Rodríquez moved on the courthouse across the street and Abet captured the nearby hospital. Fidel wanted Abel at the hospital because it seemed the safest place; he had also been designated as Castro's successor as the head of the Movement—if Castro were killed. But Abel pleaded with Fidel. "Don't be like José Martí, exposing yourself needlessly." Castro answered, "My place is at the head of the fighters. It can't be anyone else." In the end, Fidel ordered him. "It is decided: You will go to the hospital."
Castro's next argument was with Melba and Haydée. They informed him that they intended to participate in the attack. "No," said Fidel. "You've done enough. You will stay at the farmhouse." It was Dr. Muñoz, wearing a physician's white coat on Castro's instructions, who solved the dispute, proposing that the two women accompany him and Abel in the takeover of the hospital. It was a civilian hospital, not guarded by soldiers, and Melba and Haydée would be useful to him as nurses.
At four o'clock in the morning, Castro assembled the rebels in the darkened house to outline the plan of attack; only the military committee members had known until that moment that it was Moncada they were to assault. There was an instant of terrible fear of discovery when one of the men accidentally fired a shot from his rifle, but there was nobody in the area to hear it. After explaining the operation, which he promised would last no more than ten minutes, Fidel said:
"In a few hours you will be victorious or defeated, but regardless of the outcome . . . this Movement will triumph. If you win tomorrow, the aspirations of Martí will be fulfilled sooner. If the contrary occurs, our action will set an example for the Cuban people, and from the people will arise young men willing to die for Cuba. They will pick up our banner and move forward. . . . You know already the objectives of our plan; it is a dangerous plan, and anyone who leaves with me tonight will have to do so willingly. There is still time to decide. . . . Those who are determined to go should move forward. The watchword is not to kill except as the last resort."
A rebel asked Castro what should be done with prisoners, and Fidel replied, "Treat them humanely; don't insult them. And remember that the life of an unarmed man must be sacred for you." Suddenly, one of the four university students in the group told Castro that they had decided not to go because they thought the armament was not adequate for the mission. With withering indignation, Castro ordered the students placed in the bathroom under guard. Then, the radio expert from the Havana airport announced he would not engage in "illegal" actions; he, too, was taken to the bathroom. Now Fidel Castro had 123 men and two women to launch the revolution.
Castro says that when he embarked on the Moncada enterprise, "there was [only] a small group of those with the greatest responsibility and authority who already had a Marxist formation," and that he had personally acted in this context with this "nucleus of people." Recalling these events in conversations in 1985, Castro emphasizes that the "qualities we did require from the companions were, in the first place, patriotism, revolutionary spirit, seriousness, honorability, disposition to fight . . . and agreement with the goals and risks of . . . armed struggle against Batista."
Castro's definition of the ideological makeup of the Moncada rebels is entirely consistent with the recollections by scores of early Movement members that when the attack was being prepared, political instruction centered on the Martí tradition—never on Marxism-Leninism. It is also borne out by the political backgrounds of the Moncada group. According to Mario Mencía, the historian of the revolution, out of 148 participants in the Moncada and Bayamo actions, there were only two Communist party members: Raúl Castro, who had joined the party six weeks earlier and had no voice in any Movement decisions, and the sugar worker, Luciano González Camejo. Outside the party, only Fidel and one member of the Movement leadership knew of Raúl's affiliation. Castro and Abel Santamaría considered themselves serious students and adherents of Marxism, but the overwhelming number of their followers held essentially moderate social-justice views in terms of the Cuban experience.
As Castro has repeatedly stressed, he recruited Movement members among young working-class followers of the Ortodoxo party of Senator Chibás, an organization that stood for social justice, social-welfare legislation for the overwhelmingly poor Cubans, and for anti-Communist nationalism. Castro may have assumed that once exposed to widespread and victorious revolutionary processes, these Ortodoxo workers and peasants would be propelled toward socialism, relinquishing their traditional distrust of anything identified with Marxism. He has often charged that this antipathy toward Communism was due to cold war "imperialist propaganda," but the record shows the Cuban Communists' historical inability to attract the masses. On the other hand, when Chibás founded the Ortodoxo party, hundreds of thousands of workers who normally ignored political affiliations rushed to join him probably because of his enormously appealing personality.
In any event, the Fidelista "army" was of working-class origin. Only the leaders had intellectual backgrounds. Four of them had university degrees: Fidel Castro and Melba Hernández as lawyers, Mario Muñoz as a doctor, and Pedro Celestino Aguilera as a dentist. The poet Raúl Gómez García, Pedro Miret, Raúl Castro, Lester Rodríguez, and Abelar
do Crespo were occasional university students. The bulk of the Movement members had only elementary-school education, and many lacked even this background. Though lacking university degrees, five members were public accountants, including Abel Santamaría and Jesús Montané—two top rebel leaders. No more than twenty rebels earned more than two hundred pesos monthly. The largest group was construction workers (carpenters, painters, bricklayers, and so on), then came farm workers, cooks and waiters, office workers, drivers, shoemakers, mechanics, bakers, milkmen, ice-delivery men, street vendors, and self-employed persons (traveling salesmen, for example). And there were many unemployed young men in the revolutionary ranks. The oldest fighter was Manuel Rojo Pérez, a fifty-one-year-old peasant. Castro described his Moncada companions correctly when he said in a 1965 speech that while they could not be called Marxist-Leninists, "we were capable of understanding some of the essential principles of Marxism—the reality of a society divided between the exploited and the exploiters. . . . Our immediate task, our struggle with minuscule resources against that military power that flattened our country, absorbed the greatest part of our attention."