Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Eutimio, slim, thirtyish, and ever-smiling, was so highly regarded as a guide and peasant supporter of the revolution that on January 20, Fidel granted him permission to make a quick visit to his home in El Mulato, northwest of where the rebels were resting that day. In fact, Fidel gave him money. On Eutimio's way back, however, he was detained by the army, on the morrow of the defeat of Sánchez Mosquera's elite unit at Llanos del Infierno above La Plata. He was given the choice of being executed for collaborating with the rebels or betraying them. Specifically, Eutimio was offered ten thousand pesos, a major's rank in the army, and a farm of his choice if he succeeded in assassinating Castro or locating the guerrilla army so that the Batista troops could destroy it. Apparently he agreed because he was given an army safe conduct and sent off on January 25. At that point, Fidel's force was moving west toward the Caracas Mountains, en route to the southwestern rim of the Sierra for a planned conference with 26th of July Movement leaders from the cities. Two days later Eutimio encountered the rebels in a coffee field at La Olla, near El Mulato. He was warmly greeted by the unsuspecting guerrillas, and told them a long story about crossing the Llanos de Infierno battlefield, finding burned-out houses, and hurrying to warn Fidel that the army was in the vicinity. He also brought them candy.

  On the strength of these reports, Castro decided to move during the night to a high saddle in the Caracas Mountains and to remain there. Because the night was cold, Fidel shared his blanket with Eutimio as they lay down to sleep on the ground. His Colt pistol and two hand grenades under the blanket, the peasant proceeded to ask Fidel questions about the locations of sentries around them. Instinctively, Fidel gave him evasive answers. Eutimio evidently hadn't the courage to shoot Castro then and there, preferring to let the army do the job. The next morning, January 28, Eutimio again left the rebels, this time ostensibly to look for food and locate several guerrilleros who had become separated from the main force. But he went straight to the army forward command near El Mulato to report on the rebels' deployment. Meanwhile, Fidel suddenly decided to move his men some three hundred yards higher on the mountain from the canyon where the big kitchen stove had just been installed; his instinct again saved his companions' lives.

  In Castro's judgment their Caracas-peak camp was safe from an encirclement by the army; it was too steep and hard a climb. He dispatched four men to Manzanillo to deliver additional instructions concerning his approaching meeting with Movement leaders. The Rebel Army on the mountain now had twenty-five fighters, seventeen of them Granma expeditionaries (additional Alegría de Pío survivors had been reaching Castro for weeks), and more volunteers were sent up from Manzanillo. The little army's numbers fluctuated daily with arrivals and departures. Ramiro Valdés and another rebel were still convalescing in a farmhouse not far away, but hid in the forest when an army unit was spotted approaching. The previous evening Fidel's group had been resting up in their mountain camp. Che wrote in his diary that "Fidel delivered a speech to the troops to warn them about the risks of indiscipline and loss of morale. . . . Three crimes would be punished with death: insubordination, desertion and despotism . . ." At that same time, Eutimio Guerra arrived in Macho, south of the Caracas Mountains, to confer with army commanders on how best to destroy Castro. Given the terrain, the commanders decided that air strikes would be the most effective method, and Eutimio was taken by jeep to the port of Pilón, where the next morning he would be flown in a spotter plane to pinpoint the guerrilla camp.

  On January 30, just after seven o'clock in the morning, Batista aviation struck the Fidelistas, and the Rebel Army broke up into three groups and fled the area. Fidel's group of thirteen men crossed the spine of the Caracas range to the southeast gradient where the aircraft could not see them through the foliage. Castro was enraged that his force allowed itself to be dispersed for the second time, just when he thought he had consolidated the guerrillas. But at noon of the next day, he was joined by Raúl and his four-man group, and things looked better again. Che, Guillermo García, and three other men got lost in the forest, and it was two more days before they caught up with Fidel. On February 1, Castro learned that three army columns were advancing on the Caracas Mountains, he ordered the rebels to resume their westward march. Guerrilla war in mountain forests is something like blindman's buff: Neither band can see or hear the other, unless they suddenly collide in the dark, and usually the advantage is with those having the best scouts and the best knowledge of the terrain. Castro decidedly had this advantage and thus he again evaded the army.

  Hunger and thirst now became their real enemy. They had virtually nothing to eat for two days. On February 3, while crossing a forest, a rebel fighter collapsed, unable to move from thirst. Castro gave him a dry lemon he had in his pocket, and the man sucked it and swallowed it. Another rebel drank putrid water from a beer bottle he found on the trail. Che Guevara suffered an attack of malaria, made it to the spot where the column would spend the night, and collapsed. He had to stay behind the next day with two companions to look after him. Trying to walk, Che fainted several times and, as he wrote later, "I had diarrhea ten times." One night, a downpour drenched him in the camp. On February 5, Che and his companions again got lost; then they were found by Raúl and a patrol, which brought them hot chicken broth.

  Eutimio Guerra reappeared late that day, when the men were resting at a farmhouse, wearing new white trousers, a cream-colored guayabera, a new hat, and carrying fifty tins of condensed milk. Again, he was greeted with joy by the expeditionaries. Castro decided to divide his army into two teams to make it easier to cross the Sierra to the west, and the first team, including Ramiro Valdés and eight others, left at night. Fidel and twenty men, including Eutimio, stayed behind for another day. Eutimio then asked Castro to meet him alone in a coffee field, but Universo Sánchez accompanied them, visibly unnerving the peasant guide. Finally, Fidel became suspicious of Eutimio's frequent trips, his ability to obtain food, and his constant questions. Unaware that both in Manzanillo and Santiago several Movement members had overheard Eutimio's name in conversations among army officers, Castro wanted more evidence before acting.

  On February 7 Batista aircraft bombed and strafed the Caracas Mountains again, and Eutimio recommended that Castro set up camp around an abandoned shed at the bottom of a deep canyon. Fidel agreed, deploying sentries around the canyon. But the planes were back the next day, and bombs again fell on the guerrillas. Eutimio joked nervously, "I didn't tell them to bomb here," and Castro was almost convinced that he had a traitor on his hands. Raúl wrote: "Aviation fills us with plenty of fear despite so many raids." Heavy rain came on Friday, February 8, and Raúl bet Fidel and Che that it was raining harder inside the shed in the canyon than outside. Eutimio returned from still another mysterious expedition, volunteering to stand guard at the entrance to the canyon. Apparently, the plan was for him to let the army units into the canyon, but the rain was so hard that it was abandoned. Now the troops were close to the guerrillas. On Saturday, February 9, Raúl noted in his diary that "Eutimio's behavior preoccupies Fidel." Then Universo Sánchez came running into the house, shouting that a large army column was approaching. Eutimio had gone out again that morning, allegedly to buy food.

  During the day a local peasant, detained by a rebel sentry, told Fidel that 140 soldiers were deployed above the canyon. Fidel climbed a rock to watch the enemy positions through his telescopic rifle sight. He heard the peasant say that he had seen Eutimio Guerra "down there" that morning. Now Castro informed his men that he was convinced that Eutimio was a traitor. He led the rebels out of the canyon and up the Espinosa peak, which overlooked the area. Suddenly, several rebels spotted Eutimio running behind a clump of bushes, after which army soldiers concealed by nearby ridges opened fire on the Fidelistas. Júlio Zenon Acosta, one of the first peasants to join the Rebel Army, was killed instantly; he had been standing a few steps from Fidel. Che Guevara wrote that Acosta was his first literacy pupil: "We were just beginning to tell the A from the O, and t
he E from the I. . . . This illiterate guajiro who was able to understand the enormous tasks the Revolution would face, and who was preparing himself for it by learning the first letters, could not complete his labor . . ."

  The firefight went on for hours, and the rebels again divided into three groups to withdraw to the next mountain. Fidel and Raúl led a group of five under intense fire, dragging themselves through high grass to avoid detection. Brambles tore the flesh on their hands. Che, Juan Almeida, and ten others worked their way up the mountain from the other side, pursued by soldiers firing at them with automatic weapons. Guevara lost all his medicines, his books, and his rifle: "I was ashamed," he noted in his diary. Again, the Rebel Army was dispersed, but it did not allow itself to be surrounded. It lost a fighter, but the army's sustained effort in the mountains was a fiasco. By prearrangement, all the groups were attempting to reach a nearby mountain called Lomón, and the army, in a final effort to destroy the rebels, sent out planes on February 12 to strafe the forest there. By nightfall the Fidelistas were back together again, decreased in number to only eighteen men, since some of the guerrilleros were away on missions for Fidel, and some peasants had had enough and returned to their homes. The rebels found a farmhouse in a clearing where the peasants served them roast pork for a late dinner. Four days later, Fidel Castro reached the farm at the southwestern end of the Sierra Maestra where a new chapter in the political history of the revolution would be soon written. The march was easy: Only a few harmless mortar attacks by the army. Still, Eutimio Guerra would not be forgotten.

  The eighteen men who arrived at the farm of Epifanio Díaz and his wife, María Moreno, at four o'clock in the morning on Saturday, February 16, to meet with the Movement's National Directorate and for a carefully prepared interview with a New York Times editorial writer, formed a hardship-toughened and extremely cohesive fighting group. Castro was certain they would make a very positive impression on the visitors. For him the meetings were important to assert his undisputed leadership of the revolution—so much so that he had risked coming to the outer edge of the Sierra Maestra, only twenty-five miles as the crow flies from the city of Manzanillo. Despite the Batista regime's new determination to assassinate him, Fidel felt confident now that he was in control of the situation.

  "We identified so completely with the natural surroundings of the mountains," he recalls, "we adapted so well that we felt in our natural habitat. It was not easy, but I think we identified with the forest as much as the wild animals that live there [actually there are no wild animals in the Sierra Maestra.] We were constantly on the move. We always slept in the forest. At first, we slept on the ground. We had nothing with which to cover ourselves. Later, we had hammocks, and nylon . . . and we used plastic for covers to protect ourselves from the rain. We organized kitchen duty by teams. Each team would carry the cooking equipment and the food up the hill. In the beginning, we had to stop at houses to eat, but later we freed ourselves from it. And we did not know the region well. We had practically no political connections in that region. We established the relations with the population. We studied the terrain as we fought. . . . Batista was carrying on a fierce repressive campaign, and there were many burned houses, and many murdered peasants. We dealt with the peasants in a very different manner from the Batista soldiers, and we slowly gained the support of the rural population—until that support became absolute. Our soldiers came from that rural population."

  Che Guevara, always more critical than the others, was skeptical in his assessments. He wrote that "the peasantry was not prepared to become part of the struggle, and communication with [the Movement's] bases in the cities was practically non-existent." To him, the first moments after their invasion represented a "subjectivist mentality," a phase when there was "blind confidence in a rapid popular explosion, enthusiasm and faith in the power to liquidate Batista's might by a swift armed uprising combined with spontaneous revolutionary strikes and the subsequent fall of the dictator." In a sense, Guevara was right in thinking that his faith was exaggerated, but the key to Fidel Castro's whole approach to the revolution was "subjectivism," a belief that inspiring leadership (his) combined with skilled propaganda could rally the masses behind great national causes. Interestingly, Fidel's own fight with the Cuban Communists was precisely over the issue of his "subjectivism" versus the party's classic Marxist view that "objective conditions" must be created before an insurrection is launched.

  In the third month ashore, Castro had run into every imaginable disaster: the shipwreck at the edge of a mangrove swamp, a major military defeat, three dispersals of his rebel force, awesome betrayal, and now almost continuing attacks on his tiny army by the entire Batista air force and at least three thousand elite troops (the figure is Castro's). Yet none of it could break his determination to fight on or his supporters' readiness to help the insurrection. What Castro understood, probably better than Guevara, was that revolutions are not strictly rational affairs. To be sure, the setbacks had taught Fidel the accuracy of Che's comment that "characteristic of the small group of survivors, embued with a spirit of struggle, was the understanding that to imagine spontaneous outbursts throughout the island was an illusion." But in the next phase, Castro relied on his magnetism and imagination to keep the morale of his men high and to expand the guerrilla war. This brand of "subjectivism" was very much alive, and it worked in the mountains.

  As far as the peasants in general were concerned, their fears of the rebels disappeared once Castro was able to demonstrate the guerrilleros' kinship with them. Eutimio Guerra was an exception, not a rule in terms of the guajiro response. Che Guevara himself recognized that the guerrillas "were the only force which could resist and punish the abuses [of the army], and thus to take refuge amidst the guerrillas, where their lives would be protected, was a good solution" for the peasants. Castro's application of "revolutionary justice" as the rebels roamed the Sierra Maestra was applauded by the peasants; whenever a Rural Guard torturer or land company overseer was executed, word spread instantly throughout the mountains. Fidel's rebels endeared themselves even more to the guajiros when they set their weapons aside to help with the coffee harvest in May 1957; without their assistance, much of the crop would have been lost by the individual families who depended on it for survival, since many of the peasants had been taken away by the army during punitive expeditions. Naturally, Castro delivered a revolutionary speech to the coffee growers in the middle of the Sierra.

  To protect morale among the rebels, and especially the peasant and lowland volunteers, Fidel enforced rigid discipline (he had decreed that insubordination and desertion were capital offenses) as well as displaying a warm personal relationship with his rebels. Guillermo García remembers that Fidel's relations with his subordinates was "a constant theme of his life—talking to people, explaining things to them, listening to them, asking everybody's opinions about everything." At the end of every march, no matter how long, Castro "would analyze for us all that had happened that day, our problems and the enemy's problems, then he would offer an evaluation of the territory where we were." In this fashion, García says, the men had "a complete knowledge of everything . . . that was happening," and they responded with "extraordinary respect for Fidel." He remembers that "if anyone was ill, if anyone felt bad, it was a tremendous preoccupation for him, and this makes one feel respect . . . he always asked people, 'How do you feel?,' 'Did you sleep well?,' 'How was the food last night?' . . . He cared for each soldier." According to García, Fidel also knew how to listen to the peasants and how to talk to them: "He arrived with a program to discuss it with the peasants, hearing their opinions, asking what they thought of different social and political problems . . . for Fidel it was fundamental that each peasant, each child, each youth, each adult would understand the reasons for this revolutionary struggle . . ." On the other hand, the peasants would not listen to government officials or the army, even if they tried to address them, García says, because "they had nothing to tell them . . . they c
ould not keep up a conversation for five minutes with a humble peasant, a poor worker, because they would be asked, 'What do you bring me?' 'Whom do you defend?' "

  And Fidel and his men were at the same time a rough-looking and rough-sounding band. By the end of February, most of them were barbudos, sporting beards of varying sizes and colors, long hair, and filthy, torn clothes. Headgear ranged from captured army helmets to straw hats and green caps like Castro's. They easily scared anyone they encountered, and their smell was not faint. Raúl noted in February that he had just taken his third bath (in a creek) since leaving Mexico at the end of November. And their sound, too, was frightful. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, the Communist leader who spent several months around Castro in the mountains in 1958, remarked that "in the Sierra Maestra, he developed a brutally filthy language, if I can put it that way . . . he was then living the exaltation of the battle, and his every third word or his every fourth word was . . . well, you know . . ." But, Rodríguez says, Castro always watched his language in front of women.

  Shortly after five o'clock in the morning on Saturday, February 16, Fidel Castro met the woman who was to become the most important person in his life. Celia Sánchez Manduley was thirty-six years old, unmarried, extremely intelligent and efficient, dark-haired, attractive without being beautiful, and wholly dedicated to the ideals of the 26th of July Movement as defined by Castro. One of five daughters of Dr. Manuel Sánchez Silveira, Celia lived in Manzanillo and Pilón in the southwest of the province. She was acquainted from childhood with just about everybody in that tight little world, from politicians to Sierra peasants, and she was deeply involved in politics. After the 1952 Batista coup, Celia visited Havana to meet Ortodoxo party leaders, but never came across Fidel Castro.