Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  At Mongo Pérez's farm in Purial de Vicana, Fidel Castro gave his expeditionaries the rest they needed while at the same time he kept them in maximal readiness. The day after Che and his group arrived, the entire contingent was relaxing on a hillside when Castro suddenly shouted, "We are surrounded by soldiers! Take your battle positions!" The rebels responded at once, hitting the ground or hiding behind trees, their weapons at the ready, but nothing happened. Nobody moved. Then Castro, smiling, informed them that this was a false alarm, a training exercise.

  At this juncture, the Rebel Army had twenty men, including Fidel. Sixteen of them were Granma expeditionaries, and four were peasants who had formally enlisted: Guillermo García, Crescencio Pérez, his son Ignacio Pérez, and Manuel Fajardo. Subsequent propaganda emphasized that Castro resumed the war with twelve men, but this was a symbolic apostolic touch. As Guillermo García recalls that period, Castro had taken the decision "not to fight" until his force could be adequately reorganized. While carefully selected peasants were being allowed to sign up with the rebels, "it was not convenient for too many people to gather there because there would be no possibility of mobility in the case of an enemy attack." Besides, volunteers had to be recommended by peasants well known to the guerrilla leadership to prevent infiltration by Batista agents.

  Castro's greatest problem was arms. He had twelve weapons for twenty men, and he had been furious at Che and Almeida's group for having left its arms behind in a Sierra farmhouse. "To leave behind rifles in such circumstances is to pay with one's life . . . for such crime and stupidity," he berated them. But Mongo's trip to Manzanillo on December 20 paid off very quickly: Peasants arrived at the finca on the morning of December 22 with a Thompson submachine gun and eight rifles. On December 23 two men and two women (one of them Mongo's daughter) arrived from Manzanillo, sent by the 26th of July Movement in response to the word brought by Mongo that Fidel was alive. Eugenia Verdecia, the other woman, carried three hundred submachine-gun bullets and nine dynamite cartridges under her skirt.

  More relaxed about arms, Fidel now turned to the politics of the revolution. His first major decision was to send Faustino Pérez to Manzanillo, Santiago, and Havana for the twin purposes of informing the 26th of July Movement's National Directorate of the rebel situation in the Sierra Maestra and bringing newsmen—foreign newsmen if possible—to the mountains to convince the world that Castro was well and fighting. In Fidel's mind armed struggle and propaganda were always linked.

  Faustino says that he was chosen because he was a member of both the National Directorate and the military general staff, and thus in an excellent position to organize support for the Rebel Army in the mountains and provide credible confirmation of Castro's fighting presence. The immediate need was for a small group of armed fighters from the lowlands to strengthen the army, and for newspapermen to write about Fidel. On Sunday, December 23, three weeks after the Granma had brought the Fidelistas to Cuba, Faustino got into the jeep that had carried the four Movement members up the mountain from Manzanillo earlier that day. As the army had canceled its search-and-destroy operations against Castro the week before, it was not difficult to get through to his destination. Faustino was dressed like a guajiro with a straw hat, and Eugenia Verdecia, the girl who had concealed submachine-gun bullets and dynamite under her skirt on the way up, pretended to be his fiancée. Reaching Manzanillo in the evening, Faustino saw Celia Sánchez immediately on arrival, and now contact was formally established between the Rebel Army and the Movement. Faustino and Celia talked all night, though at first "they gave me a meal I can never forget because I was suffering from organic hunger, and they served me that marvelous cream of asparagus soup . . ."

  The following day Faustino drove to Santiago for meetings with key members of the Movement's leadership: Frank País, the provincial coordinator who had thought Fidel was too precipitate in the invasion, Vilma Espín, his local associate, and, from Havana, Armando Hart, Haydée Santamaría, and María Antonia Figurea. It was Christmas Day when Faustino Pérez slid quietly into Havana. It would be almost a year and a half before he would return to the Sierra Maestra.

  At Mongo's finca the expeditionaries and their peasant friends spent Christmas Eve in a coffee field, eating a roast piglet and washing it down with wine. On Christmas Day Fidel decided it was no longer safe to remain in the same place, and that the time had come to move deeper into the Sierra Maestra. Before departing just before midnight, fifteen rebels signed a letter of thanks to Mongo Pérez, drafted by Fidel, declaring that "the help that we have received from him and many others like him in the most critical days of the Revolution encourages us to continue to struggle with more faith than ever, convinced that a people such as ours deserves every sacrifice . . ." This was Castro's first document of the Sierra war, and he could not wait to engage in military activities. Thus after leaving Mongo's farm the rebels spent the entire night in exercises that ranged from an assault on a mud hut to crossing and recrossing the Vicana River eighteen times in the dark. Then Fidel turned southeast, moving toward the Caribbean coast through the Sierra's high mountains. On December 28 the rebel column was augmented by three expeditionaries who had been believed lost and by three peasant volunteers. They brought a rifle and, for Fidel, magazines and newspapers—the first he had seen in Cuba since the Granma landing. Reading them, he learned that José Miró Cardona, the president of the Cuban Bar Association, and Elena Mederos, a liberal member of the Society of Friends of the Republic, had met with Batista's prime minister, Jorge García Montes, to demand decent and humanitarian treatment for the Fidelista rebels captured after Alegría de Pío. Castro filed the names away in his mind: Both Cardona and Mederos would be invited to join the revolutionary government.

  On December 29, Eugenia Vardecia, concealing sixteen explosive charges, four submachine-gun clips, three dynamite cartridges, and eight hand grenades, caught up with Castro's column in the hills. Again, a Cuban woman was playing a crucial revolutionary role. Her companion brought volumes on the geography and history of Cuba to be used in teaching the peasants who were joining the Rebel Army. Calixto Moráles, the ex-schoolteacher, was put in charge of education and indoctrination, an important function in building the new army. Che Guevara received an algebra text he had requested. Then, another all-night march in cold rain with only a two-hour halt at a peasant home where a hot meal awaited the rebels. The Rebel Army, now composed of twenty-nine men (additional peasants had joined it), spent New Year's Eve asleep guarded by sentries in a large shed without walls on a wood-covered hillside.

  The year 1957 opened with a downpour of freezing rain that prevented the Castro guerrillas from advancing for two days. They had nine small nylon covers for the rifles, but nothing to protect themselves. One night Raúl Castro slept inside a sack of corn flour. The march resumed on January 3, and two days later the rebels stood atop Tatequieto heights on the spine of the Sierra Maestra. In the distance, five miles away, Fidel could see the triple peaks of the Caracas Mountains to the east. "If we can get there," he said, "neither Batista nor anybody else can defeat us in this war."

  Then they were on the march again, still moving southeast because Castro had concluded that he could reach the center of the Sierra Maestra more easily from the south, up the natural ridges and canyons, rather than going straight east across them. It was longer but less punishing. Besides, Fidel had developed the notion that he could seize small coastal military garrisons to acquire more weapons. The march from Tatequieto to the coast, with the column advancing sometimes at night and sometimes in the daytime, took eleven days, until January 16. More peasants joined up during the first weeks of January, and now the Rebel Army had thirty-three men. On January 8 the rebels halted for two days at the farmhouse of Eutimio Guerra, a trusted peasant, in El Mulato, a village directly south of the Caracas peaks. The men ate, drank brandy with honey, then suddenly learned that their presence had been somehow reported to Batista's army, and Castro ordered instant departure in the middle of the
night. The mountains were so steep that they had to hold on to the vegetation and sometimes moved on all fours. Ramiro Valdés fell, chipping a knee bone. After Che treated him, Valdés dragged himself along the best he could. On January 11 five peasant guerrillas decided to return home, and Castro let them go. He had already resolved to attack the garrison at La Plata on the coast, and he wanted to be only with men he could fully trust. Moreover, Batista authorities suspected that an attack could come from the mountains, and on January 13 the army arrested eleven local peasants; all were murdered.

  On January 14 the rebels came to the banks of the Magdalena River, just west of La Plata, leaving the injured Ramiro Valdés and another ailing rebel at a mountain farmhouse. Crossing the Magdalena, they ran into two beekeepers. They paid ten pesos for sixty pounds of honey, but decided to keep one of the beekeepers as a hostage to protect themselves; the other beekeeper was let go after taking an oath of silence. The hostage was paid five pesos a day during captivity, and Castro let him sleep in his hammock. The next day, guided by the beekeeper, the Fidelistas reached the heights overlooking the estuary of the La Plata River. They could see uniformed soldiers below, around the post's four structures, the military barracks, and the house of the foreman of the company owning the land in the area.

  In Havana General Batista announced on January 15 that the United States had sold his regime sixteen brand-new B-26 bombers. Batista was still skeptical about a Castro revolution, but now he knew that Fidel was alive somewhere in Oriente, and he thought it prudent to modernize and beef up his armed forces. The Eisenhower administration was glad to oblige. Above La Plata that same day, Fidel Castro was preparing his first attack on the Batista forces since Moncada, three and a half years ago. The little garrison on the beach was made up of five Rural Guard soldiers and five sailors under the command of an army sergeant (a coast-guard cutter sat offshore), and Castro was determined to win this battle.

  He had twenty-six men with him and, for once, numerical superiority. With a few rebels, Fidel moved on the night of January 16 to a point about three hundred yards from the barracks, awaiting passers-by who could tell him exactly what the soldiers below were doing. Four peasants were caught there, by the guerrillas and Castro learned that Chicho Osorio, the land company overseer, feared and detested by the local peasants, would be coming by on his way home. Presently the fifty-year-old Osorio, mounted on a yellow mule, a brandy bottle in his hand, and completely drunk, appeared on the trail where Castro captured him. Osorio's .45-caliber pistol was taken away. Fidel introduced himself as an army colonel, and the overseer, putting in his false teeth, told him that "the order is to kill Fidel Castro. . . . If I find him, I'll kill him like a dog. . . . You see this .45 you took away from me? I'll kill him with this gun if I catch him . . ." Then, Osorio proceeded to give Fidel the names of the peasants in the region who cooperated with the army and those suspected of helping the rebels. He added: "You see the boots I'm wearing? They belonged to one of those who came with Fidel Castro, and whom we killed around here . . ." Che Guevara wrote that at that moment Chicho Osorio had signed his own death warrant.

  Osorio's hands were tied behind his back, and at dawn the next day, January 17, Castro asked him to guide his force to the military barracks, pretending that as a colonel he wanted to surprise the slothful soldiers there. Still drunk, the overseer happily agreed. Just then, a government soldier on horseback rode by, dragging behind him five peasants tied up with thongs, and Osorio said proudly he was his friend. The rebels were divided into four squads: Fidel, Che, and four other fighters deployed to the right of the target area, the other squads closed the circle. At 2:30 A.M. the Fidelistas started firing on the garrison. Simultaneously, Chicho Osorio was executed on Fidel's orders by the rebels guarding him. Raúl Castro wrote in his diary that "Chicho's fate was sealed a long time ago, just like the fate of any land company overseer who falls into our hands, and the punishment is summary execution, the only way to deal with those thugs . . ." The rebels were totally unforgiving when it came to traitors and "exploiters" of the people, men said to have killed and mistreated peasant families.

  The combat was brief. Two soldiers were killed, five were wounded (three of them died later), one escaped, and three were taken prisoner. The barracks and other structures were set on fire, and weapons and ammunition were collected. The booty was nine Springfield rifles and a Thompson submachine gun, plus plenty of munitions and other supplies. This was the first time since Alegría de Pío that Fidel had more weapons than men. It was his first victory, and with no losses, and he and his companions showed magnanimity. Che treated the wounded, and Fidel told the prisoners: "I congratulate you. You behaved like men. You are free. Look after your wounded, and leave whenever you want." The rebels left medicine for the enemy wounded before vanishing back in the Sierra Maestra. At La Plata Castro set the policy toward his enemies for the rest of the war: Prisoners were always sent back alive, traitors and "exploiters" were mercilessly executed.

  La Plata was a psychological and military milestone in the guerrilla war. Pedro Álvarez Tabío, the official historian of the Sierra Maestra era, says that this battle "demonstrated for the first time the axiom that Fidel would apply throughout the whole war: that a guerrilla army must live on weapons and supplies captured from the enemy [and] except for a few shipments of arms received from outside the sierra, this would be the state of affairs during the entire war." At 4:30 A.M., January 17, 1957, exactly two hours after the start of the battle, Fidel Castro ordered his triumphant men to march again, back into the heart of the Sierra Maestra. He set the peaks of Palma Mocha as the next objective. As he observed later, "We had our first successful battle when no one believed we were still alive."

  CHAPTER

  10

  Two weeks after the victory at La Plata, Fidel Castro's guerrillas barely escaped alive from an extraordinarily precise surprise aerial attack on their camp in the heart of the Sierra Maestra by B-26 bombers and P-47 fighter planes of the Batista army. It was sheer luck that the rebels lost no men in this raid (a bomb exploded on top of the big kitchen stove on which breakfast was being cooked that morning), but they were once more dispersed and disorganized. Only on the third day after the furious bombing and strafing of the guerrilleros high up on the side of the Caracas peaks was Castro able to reassemble his force; it had been divided into three groups led, respectively, by him, Raúl, and Che.

  The attack also served to make it virtually official that Raúl and Che had become the principal rebel leaders under Fidel. In the two months since the landing of the Granma, they had easily eclipsed their surviving fellow officers and such prominent fighters as Ramiro Valdés, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Universo Sánchez. To be sure, Raúl and Che had a degree of education and sophistication their present companions lacked, and they were much more politically mature than the others. Ideologically, Raúl had been a member of the Cuban Communist party for nearly four years, and Che, three years older, was a serious student of Marxism-Leninism, never concealing his allegiance.

  With respect to their relationship with Fidel, there is no question that Raúl was the closest, personally and politically. He was a practical politician and the natural number two figure in the guerrilla band—and after. Intellectually, it was Che who had the greatest kinship with Fidel, with his erudition, fine irony, and quick mind. Both were superb chess players and masters of the mental rapier. Though Che could never quite overcome his complex about being a foreigner among Cubans, he was the conscience of the Cuban revolution, or at least he tried to be. He was not a practical politician, his revolutionary principles were above compromise. He did not hesitate to tangle with Fidel over matters of ideology during the war in the Sierra or to take on the Soviet Union many years later when he thought revolutionary ideals were at stake. Che may have been naïve, but he was the purest and the most honest idealist of the revolution. Despite appearances, Che's relations with Raúl were not as warm as they were with Fidel. Still, they were friendly and clo
se, after a fashion. Che taught Raúl to speak French during the long months in the Sierra, but he never sought to compete with Raúl in his relationship with Fidel.

  When men are thrown together to live and fight a war, their relationships, character traits, strengths, and weaknesses are defined more sharply and quickly than under other circumstances. This was especially true in the Cuban guerrilla war with its hardships and constantly shared dangers. After two months of this war and companionship, it was already very clear what Fidel, Raúl, and Che represented then, and would in the future. In their actions, beliefs, personal behavior, conversations, official and private letters, and, in the case of Raúl and Che, the campaign diaries they kept, they were acutely aware of their historical roles. The campaign diaries were poetic, romantic, and downright lyrical in acknowledging this. Fidel's literary output during the two years in the Sierra was of an epistolary, order-of-the-day, and political manifesto nature. Knowing Fidel, Raúl, and Che in the Sierra Maestra was to know them afterward, when they wielded power. They never really changed, though the nature of the revolution that sustained them would.

  After two months in Cuba, the bombing on January 30, 1957, was the third time the rebels came close to annihilation, the first being the Granma shipwreck and the second, Alegría de Pío. Responsible for the bombing was a traitor named Eutimio Guerra at whose house they rested and prepared for the assault on La Plata and who guided them up and down the mountain for weeks. That Fidel with his sixth sense about danger and betrayal, and Raúl with his obsession about espionage and counterespionage, were not able to see through this man represented one of their great failures in the guerrilla war. A week earlier, the Batista army had mounted its own attempt to surround and destroy the rebels, but Fidel was able to ambush the soldiers, killing five of them. This was his first encounter with Lieutenant Ángel Sánchez Mosquera, probably the best field commander in the Batista army, who would remain Fidel's nemesis until the end of the war.