Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  The whole operation did suffer a delay when the motorcade had to halt at the narrow bridge over San Juan River to let a jeep pass with two innocent hunters going out of town for a day in the countryside. Then Fidel, swearing savagely, had to stop his Buick just before the turnoff to the barracks to let the advance party's car maneuver into position in front of him.

  The time for the attack on Moncada had been set for 5:15 A.M., but it was probably a few minutes later when the commando vehicle, a Mercury, braked at Grate 3 to force entry into the courtyard and open the way for Fidel's Buick and the rest of the motorized column. The commando team hit at once. Because the Movement operated on the principle that leaders must always personally lead armed actions, this eight-man commando team was composed of two military committee members, Renato Guitart and José Luis Tasende; a civilian committee member, Jesús Montané; the three best cell leaders, Ramiro Valdés, Pedro Marrero, and José Suárez; and two outstanding marksmen, Carmelo Noa and Flores Betancourt (whose brother was in the Bayamo detachment).

  According to plan, Guitart shouted imperiously at the three army sentinels at the gate, "Clear the way, the general is coming!" and the men, seeing his sergeant's stripes, drew up at attention. Montané, Valdés, and Suárez took the Springfield rifles away from the stunned soldiers while Guitart and the four others removed the iron chain over the entrance, following the plan, and rushed up the outside stairs of the barracks building to occupy Moncada's radio communications center and prevent contact with Havana and Holguín.

  Fidel, armed with his huge Luger pistol, slowed down the Buick as he drove past the military hospital on his left, about 150 yards before Gate 3. He had slowed down so that he and his six companions could decide what to do about a two-man army patrol, armed with submachine guns, that suddenly materialized in front of them and was now tensely watching the action at the gate. The patrol was either ahead of time in its appointed rounds, or the Fidelistas were critically behind schedule. Simultaneously, a real army sergeant also appeared in the street, out of nowhere, examining the situation suspiciously. For all practical purposes, the rebels lost the battle of Moncada at that precise moment because with the first light of dawn they no longer had the element of total surprise in their favor.

  "At that moment," Fidel Castro told French historian Robert Merle in 1962, "I had two ideas in my mind. Because each of them had a submachine gun, I feared that the men of the army patrol will start firing on our companions who were busy disarming the sentinels. In the second place, I wanted to avoid that their fire alert the rest of the barracks. I conceived, then, the idea of surprising them and taking them prisoner. This seemed easy because their backs were turned to me . . ."

  All these events lasted seconds, perhaps minutes, as Fidel drove slowly toward the patrol, readying his Luger, carefully opening the door on his side, then suddenly accelerating and hurling the Buick at them when they turned and pointed their Thompsons in his direction. The Buick hit the curb at an angle with the left front wheel, and the engine stalled. The army sergeant shifted his body, aiming his revolver at Fidel, but he was brought down by rifle fire from the rebel vehicle behind the Buick. Fidel and Pedro Miret, who rode with him in the Buick's front seat, somehow found themselves on the ground behind their car, with a soldier firing at them from a window of the military hospital on their left. Bullets whizzed past Fidel's face, and he covered his ear with his hand as if he had been deafened. At that moment, alarm bells went off with shrieking fury throughout the barracks.

  The entire action was over in less than a half hour. Ramiro Valdés, Jesús Montané, and José Suárez were the only rebels who actually succeeded in entering the fort, and for a few minutes they had as captives some fifty half-dressed soldiers they found on cots along the walls inside the courtyard. But other soldiers, rifles and revolvers in hand, began appearing from all over the barracks, firing at the three rebels. Soon the three were separated, each fighting his way out of the building. Valdés and Montané remember felling several soldiers with their bullets. All three ultimately escaped to the street.

  Now soldiers were firing massively at the retreating Fidelistas trapped in the twenty-foot-wide street between Gate 3 and Garzon Avenue behind them; it was the short street past the military hospital the assault automobiles had taken to rush the Moncada gate. Fire came from the roofs and windows of the barracks above them, from the military hospital, and, in a diagonal trajectory, from a .30-caliber heavy machine gun mounted atop a tower on the firing range some six-hundred feet away. The rebels were an excellent target for the machine gun, whose emplacement on the range was a painful surprise for them (they were also ignorant that a .50-caliber heavy machine gun was on the roof of the officers' club, neutralizing Raúl Castro's small group at the Palace of Justice).

  Renato Guitart, the member of the military committee who had been in charge of most of the arrangements in his native Santiago, was killed in front of Gate 3 along with Pedro Marrero, Carmelo Noa, and Flores Betancourt. They were the first rebel fatalities of Castro's revolution.

  Fidel Castro knew that he had irretrievably lost the Moncada battle the instant his Buick stalled outside the fortress and the alarm bells began clanging, but he still tried desperately to regroup his men for a second attack. He stood in the middle of the street, barely visible in the half-light of the dawn and the thickening gunsmoke, shouting commands and encouragements of "Adelante, muchachos! Adelante! . . ." (Advance, boys! Advance! . . .) But the men could neither hear him nor understand him, and the spirit of the attack was quickly lost. To set them an example, Fidel climbed back in the Buick to try to start it up, but it was in vain. Furious beyond words, he attempted once more to regroup his troops, waving his Luger in the air. Most of the rebels were hiding behind the low fences of the bungalows across the street, pinned down by withering fire from Moncada.

  Yet, Fidel still stood his ground. Spotting two soldiers setting up a heavy machine gun on the roof of the fort, he fired at them with his heavy pistol, then fired again at other soldiers taking up positions above. His companions were yelling, "Fidel, Fidel! . . . Get out of there! . . . Get out! . . .," but he seemed oblivious to their cries and to the hail of bullets around him.

  Pedro Miret, then the Movement's principal military expert (after Fidel), believes that it was impossible to regroup the attackers because "the people faced a situation that had not been anticipated." Reminiscing about the battle, he says that the plan called for all the automobiles to enter the courtyard behind Fidel's car, for Fidel to lead the men up the main staircase to occupy the Moncada command post, and then for others to spread out through the barracks. But when this failed, there was little Fidel could do "as he urgently tried to organize everything in the midst of a firefight." Miret thinks that the "critical moment" was the accident of the sudden encounter with the army patrol. After the rebels were thrown back, he says, Fidel attempted to deploy a defensive line to cover the retreat, and was "again organizing everybody." But Miret adds, "This is easy to say because we had lots of people who never heard real gunfire and, especially, never heard a .50-caliber machine gun, which is very impressive."

  In the end, Miret says that Fidel "decided to leave" with as many men as he could, and they became separated. Miret will not admit it, but he and two others seem to have stayed behind deliberately to cover the departure of the Castro group; he wound up inside the military hospital, beaten, left for dead, rescued by a doctor, put in bed, nearly murdered by army intelligence agents in the hospital, and, finally, put on trial. It was in prison that he next saw Fidel.

  Meanwhile, Fidel was in an absolute fury at himself, since he concluded that it had been a frightful error to order the capture of the army patrol. The resulting series of clashes had led to the sounding of the alarm in the barracks and the end of his chance at Moncada. With his companions falling dead or wounded, a new attack was out of the question, and there was no alternative but to become resigned to defeat and to pull back. In a letter written in prison on De
cember 31, 1953, Fidel told a friend that "for me the happiest moment in 1953, in all my life, was that moment when I was soaring into combat—just as it was when I had to face the tremendous adversity of defeat with its sequence of infamy, calumny, ingratitude, incomprehension, and envy."

  Satisfied that all the surviving rebels had left the vicinity of Moncada, Fidel got into the last vechicle to depart from the scene, a car containing six other men, including one with a serious thigh wound. But as the automobile started, Fidel saw a rebel on foot trying to escape from the gunfire from the fort behind them. He ordered the car to halt, stepped out to make room for the other man, and proceeded to retreat, moving backward and firing at the barracks. As he was turning the corner of Garzon Avenue behind the military hospital and out of the field of direct fire, the automobile belonging to a rebel taxi driver from Artemisa came in reverse from Gate 3 and picked up Castro and three additional companions.

  The first idea occurring to Fidel at that point was that the simultaneous attack at Bayamo might have succeeded, and that he should try to join the contingent there. But he also decided that the five of them in the car could start by capturing the small Rural Guard post at El Caney, a few miles north of Santiago, and secure the rearguard for Bayamo. If the action at Bayamo had failed, Fidel reasoned, they would go up the mountains to continue the struggle—as the Movement's plans had anticipated—and El Caney would be the best place to regroup.

  The driver of the car, who was unfamiliar with the Santiago region, either misunderstood Castro's instructions or simply had no desire to go to fight in El Caney. Thus, instead of going north, he turned east on the road leading to El Siboney farmhouse and ran into the four rebels who had been left behind before dawn when Boris Luis Santa Coloma's car had a flat and could not continue. Fidel no longer insisted on doubling back to El Caney, and he stopped a passing private car, ordering the two occupants to take the four rebels to El Siboney, the first vehicle following him. (The private car then continued on its way.) Not quite three hours had elapsed since Fidel Castro had left the farmhouse to conquer Moncada—and Cuba.

  In Havana, Naty Revuelta had left her Vedado apartment at five o'clock in the morning, as instructed by Fidel Castro, to distribute copies of the Moncada Manifesto to political leaders and newspaper publishers. Several of them were not at home; others were unreceptive. A publisher sent his son-in-law out to meet Naty in the living room to tell her that they just had heard on the radio the news of a failed armed coup in Santiago. Naty was gently but firmly pushed out of the apartment. And she knew that if she were stopped by agents of SIM, the Military Intelligence Service, and copies of the revolutionary document were found in her handbag, she faced imprisonment or worse.

  From the high terrace of the Palace of Justice, Raúl Castro and his men witnessed the debacle in front of Gate 3, but they could be of no real help. Strategically, they were in an excellent spot, but their weapons were inadequate to give Fidel covering fire, and the terrace quickly became a target for the Moncada heavy machine guns. Seeing that Fidel's group was retreating and the shooting was dying down, Raúl concluded that their support mission had been fulfilled, and that they had better leave before being surrounded. Downstairs they ran into five armed policemen, but were able to take their revolvers away and to get into the car driven by Mario Dalmau, fleeing in a hail of bullets. Only Lester Rodríguez, whose home was in Santiago, went on foot to his parents' house. The courthouse team suffered no casualties. Raúl ordered Dalmau to drive to the coast.

  Occupying the civilian hospital, across the street from the western side of the Moncada compound, Abel Santamaría could not see what was happening at Gate 3, and he was unaware of Fidel's gradual retreat. But soldiers from the barracks were now firing heavily at the hospital, and Abel realized that he was being encircled and trapped. Thinking that by fighting as long as possible he could aid Fidel's group, wherever they were, Abel decided to stay at the hospital until he ran out of ammunition. He told his sister Haydée and Melba Hernández that "we are lost," that they should try to escape, and that they might survive because they were women. Abel added: "Don't take risks. . . . Someone has to live to tell what happened here."

  But Heydée and Melba did not even try to flee. The firing stopped around eight o'clock in the morning when Abel and his men had no more bullets, and the soldiers also stopped shooting. But the army waited a full hour before daring to enter the hospital building, and the two women spent the time helping the nurses feed screaming babies in the maternity ward; the babies had been in the midst of a battle for nearly three hours. In the meantime, other nurses put hospital gowns on the rebels and made them appear to be bedridden patients to protect them from the soldiers. Abel's head was bandaged over one eye, and he was put to bed in the ophthalmology section.

  It was the rebels' fate that the Moncada civilian press chief, Señor Carabia Carey, happened to be at the hospital during the siege, undergoing some form of treatment, and he betrayed the Fidelistas to the army, adding that two rebel women were also hiding in the building. Melba and Haydée saw Abel being yanked out of bed and beaten with rifle butts; his face was a bloody mass. In the late morning, the women were escorted to Moncada, and as they crossed the street, they witnessed Dr. Mario Muñoz being hit on the head by rifle butts, then shot in the back. He died on his forty-fifth birthday, a mild-mannered physician with a small moustache and spectacles. Carabia was arrested after the revolution, and served most of a thirty-year prison term. He was then allowed to leave for the United States.

  In a hallway in the Moncada headquarters building, Haydée and Melba saw a young man, his face so smashed by rifle-butt blows as to be beyond recognition, thrown on the floor by soldiers. They made him sit down on a bench, and the youth had the strength to scribble on a piece of paper, "I was taken prisoner—Your son." Melba realized it was meant for his mother, then she looked into his eyes and knew he was Raúl Gómez García, the young poet who had drafted the Moncada Manifesto, written a stirring poem at El Siboney, and chosen to read the Movement's victorious proclamations over the radio. Then a soldier shot him dead.

  The soldiers referred to the rebels as "Koreans," a derrogatory allusion to North Korean Communists who had invaded South Korea three years earlier. Haydée and Melba heard them brag about beating to death a very tall and tough rebel who tried to fight them with his fists, who had had to be tied up to be tortured by army interrogators. When a soldier mentioned that the rebel wore black-and-white shoes, Haydée realized it was her fiancé, Boris Luis, as he had been unable to procure boots that fit him. He died without saying a word. Later, Haydée was told by a soldier that Abel was being tortured, and a sergeant brought her her brother's gouged-out eye as proof. Abel died under torture later that Sunday. All the men in Abel's detachment were subsequently murdered by the army except for a young teacher who succeeded in hiding.

  Ramiro Valdés, one of the three attackers who actually penetrated Moncada, extricated himself from the battle and climbed into one of the rebels' cars, dragging Gustavo Arcos, a friend who had been shot in the belly. Arcos had traveled in Fidel's car from the farm to Moncada, then became separated from him in the affray. The car had four flat tires, but Valdés drove on the rims, succeeding in getting Arcos to a physician's home blocks away.

  Nearly ninety miles northwest of Santiago, the Bayamo rebel detachment was destroyed in less than fifteen minutes. Twenty-seven men had been assigned to the operation there, but only twenty-two actually took part in the attack on the army barracks. Led by Raúl Martínez Arará, an early Movement member, the detachment, divided into three squads, rushed the structure from the back because it was the only side protected by barbed wire instead of a wall.

  The rebels, moving at 5:15 A.M. in complete darkness, crossed an open field between the street and the barbed-wire fence. But they discovered to their surprise that the gate in the fence, open during the day, was padlocked at night. Attempting to climb over the fence, the men stumbled upon empty cans covering t
he ground, alerting the soldiers. A dog barked, horses in the stable kicked the sides of their stalls, and a sentinel shouted, "Halt!" Hiding behind bushes, the Fidelistas began firing on the barracks with their sports rifles and shotguns, but the soldiers countered with machine-gun fire—and it was all finished.

  Raúl Martínez Arará ordered the retreat, and the men raced to their cars or just down the street on foot. Twelve rebels died at Bayamo (including Mario Martínez Arará, the commander's brother, who was tortured to death). The ten survivors succeeded in escaping. Among them were the commander, Fidel's friend Nico López, the black poet Agustín Díaz Cartaya who weeks earlier had composed a revolutionary march that would become famous later as "The 26th of July March," and Teodulio Mitchel, the truck driver who had brought Fidel from Havana to El Siboney only six hours earlier (he had rushed to Bayamo to fight as soon as he dropped Castro off).