Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  When Castro exiled himself in Mexico in mid-1955, after his release from prison, and began planning the invasion, Celia already had solid contacts with the nascent Movement. She obtained navigation charts for the southwestern Oriente coast for Pedro Miret, during his reconnaissance of the area with Frank País. Armando Hart, a Movement founder, recalls that Celia came to Havana afterward to ask to be included in Castro's projected invasion. However, he says, Frank País wanted her to stay in Manzanillo to organize the support for the landing expeditionaries.

  In Oriente, working with Frank País, she put together the clandestine peasant network of the Movement that would meet the Granma and transport the rebels to the Sierra; she waited over forty-eight hours for Castro to land in her area. In the aftermath of Alegría de Pío, as a new member of the Movement's National Directorate, Celia organized in Manzanillo thefirst urban support system for the guerrillas (Frank País's Santiago group had been shattered by the abortive November 30 uprising), and dispatched arms, ammunition, food, supplies, and volunteers to the mountains through her peasant network. It was not much help at the start, but for Castro even a single bullet counted then. It was Celia who received Faustino Pérez when he came down from the Sierra at Christmas to tell the world that Castro was alive and fighting (she had sent a jeep up to the Sierra to fetch him after the first messenger brought the word), and she helped him continue to Santiago and Havana. Then, Celia went to work on preparing Castro's forthcoming meeting with the National Directorate, and arranging the interview with the New York Times writer. She turned Manzanillo into the rebels' logistics center, right under the noses of the Batista police, the Military Intelligence Service, and the army garrison. Celia was the latest in the providential women who always appeared at crucial moments in his life.

  Celia, whose code names were "Norma" and "Aly," left Manzanillo with Frank País on the evening of Friday, February 16, in a car driven by Felipe Guerra Matos, a Movement member. Reaching the point of penetration into the Sierra around midnight, they walked all night with a rebel guide. Right after dawn they ran into Luis Crespo, one of Castro's top fighters, and then into Fidel and his group, who also had been marching all night to the Epifanio Díaz farmhouse. Now at 5:00 A.M. Fidel and Celia met face to face in the middle of a pasture several hundred yards from the house. Castro had met Frank País on his two visits to Mexico, but Celia had been an elusive figure. Neither of them ever described this first meeting, but the mutual impression must have been formidable. The pasture meeting marked the birth of a twenty-three-year association, lasting until her death.

  Raúl joined his brother in the field to meet Celia and Frank, and the four talked until high noon, when for security reasons they decided to move to a canefield a half mile away to lunch on delicacies the visitors had brought from Manzanillo and to continue their talk. Fidel gave Celia and Frank a detailed account of what had happened to the rebels from the time they left Mexico. Celia and Frank reported on the failed Santiago uprising, the progress in their efforts to expand the Movement, and the rumors they had heard that Eutimio Guerra was in the pay of the army. Fidel insisted on the urgent need for recruits and arms and ammunition from the cities. Together they outlined a plan for making Manzanillo a staging point en route to the Sierra Maestra under Celia's direction, and for using the Epifanio Díaz farm as the channel into the mountains. The farm, called Los Chorros, had been chosen for this meeting because the Díaz family was fully trusted politically—two of the sons belonged to the Movement—and Castro thought that the farm would make an excellent gateway to the guerrilla world. By midafternoon, it began to look like rain, and Fidel asked Guillermo García and two other rebels to put up a shed with a roof in the field; the four went on talking until nightfall. Meanwhile, Castro had decided to stay away from the farm until the arrival of the other Movement leaders and the American journalist and spent the night outside.

  Faustino Pérez, Armando Hart, Haydée Santamaría, and Vílma Espín arrived early in the evening, and were taken to the field to meet the Castro brothers and Celia and Frank. Fidel had not seen Armando and Haydée (who had meanwhile become engaged) since he left Havana in mid-1955, and this was the first time he met Vílma. The daughter of a Santiago physician and American-educated, Vílma was not a member of the National Directorate, but she was so active in the Movement in Oriente that Frank País made a point of inviting her to come along. Vílma also spoke English and could interpret for the newsman. She presently met Raúl, whom she would marry right after the revolution. There was quite a bit of intermarriage in the top rebel leadership—Melba Hernández and Jesús Montané were already married—but divorces came later in most cases. Raúl and Vílma would be an exception.

  Frank País and Haydée had come to the Sierra with the idea of persuading Castro to leave Cuba for a Latin American country where he could reorganize the Movement in greater safety. As Haydée later recalled the conversation, Frank had told her, "I haven't talked to him yet, but let us see how we should say it to him. . . . They could kill him [here] and we cannot afford this luxury." But before they could broach the subject that evening in the Sierra field, Fidel said to them, "Look how the soldiers just fire from below and don't dare to come up here! If you can bring me so many bullets and so many rifles, I promise you that within two months I'll really be in combat. . . . We only need some thousands of bullets and a reinforcement of twenty armed men, and we'll win the war with Batista." Frank and Haydée had underestimated Castro's optimism and self-confidence before meeting him that evening, and Haydée recalled later that "we couldn't say anything to him because he spoke with such conviction, and he wasn't asking much . . ." Celia commented afterward that "Frank left as convinced as I was that Fidel saw things correctly . . ." When night came, a peasant from the farmhouse brought a big pot of chicken and rice and malanga root. After dinner Luis Crespo told them there was an abandoned shack nearby where the three women could sleep. Fidel, Raúl, and the other men volunteered to accompany them, but nobody could find the shack. Celia recounted later that "we walked around so much that we couldn't find the [dinner] camp, and we slept in the open field." Fidel had decided it was not safe to wander blindly at night, so he picked a spot in a pasture among a stand of palm trees. It was 2:30 A.M. when they finally went to sleep, and as Castro said, "The night was fresh, the mosquitos abundant, and the soldiers close."

  At dawn, the New York Times emissary had arrived at a camp at the farm, and Universo Sánchez located Castro to tell him about it. Fidel instructed him to tell the journalist that he was at a meeting with the general staff at one of the other rebel camps in the area, and that he would come over as soon as possible. Castro was determined to prevent the journalist from finding out that the Rebel Army consisted of only eighteen men. He had not seen the camp where the meeting would be held because of having spent the previous twenty-four hours in the fields talking with Celia, Frank, and the others, but he had instructed his men to make the site appear like a busy guerrilla command post. Castro was as much a master of detail as he was a master of the grand sweep.

  The emissary from The New York Times to the Sierra Maestra was Herbert L. Matthews. He was a highly respected member of the paper's editorial board, and he specialized in Latin American affairs. As a reporter for the Times he had covered the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish civil war, and World War II, and in the 1950s he became the editorial voice on the Western Hemisphere. When Faustino Pérez came to Havana from the Sierra at Christmas to arrange a visit to the Rebel Army by an American journalist, the 26th of July Movement immediately contacted the local Times bureau. The contact was made by Javier Pazos, an economics student whose father had been president of the Cuban National Bank before Batista and was himself very close to the 26th of July Movement. He learned that Matthews was planning a trip to Cuba anyway, so Ruby Hart Phillips, the Times local correspondent, cabled New York suggesting that Matthews come soon. Matthews had had an interest in the Cuban story when most of the American press was barel
y aware that a story—or a Fidel Castro—even existed, so he agreed instantly, asking no questions. The Times had no idea either what awaited Matthews.

  To the newspaperman, the assignment had great personal as well as professional significance. Scholarly and reserved, he was a romantic at heart. The defeat of the Republic in Spain by the fascistic Nationalists that he had witnessed was an emotional jolt from which he never fully recovered. He wrote later: "A bell tolled in the jungle of the Sierra Maestra." A champion of Latin American democracy on the Times editorial page, Matthews saw the emergence of the Castro rebellion as the latest worthwhile cause in the Americas; in Fidel Castro and his Movement he sensed a vindication of the Spanish tragedy. At the age of fifty-seven, Matthews felt almost paternal about this movement of young people in Cuba.

  Although Castro had never heard of Matthews, the visit had a calculated and immediate political importance for him. Once more, he was taking a page from José Martí's book. As it happened, Martí had arranged to have an American journalist cover his guerrilla war against the Spaniards shortly after landing in Oriente on April 11, 1895. George E. Bryson of the New York Herald interviewed Martí on May 2 as the apostle marched through the mountains northwest of Santiago, and then Martí and General Gómez, his military commander, wrote a long letter to the Herald, outlining the program of the Cuban revolutionary movement. Bryson returned to New York with the letter, but Martí was killed in combat on May 19. In his diary Martí remarked that he worked with "the correspondent of the Herald George Eugene Bryson until three o'clock in the morning," and the whole of the next day. "I work the entire day on the manifesto for the Herald, and more for Bryson." He notes that Bryson left on May 4.

  Now, sixty-two years later, the Bryson scenario was being replayed with Matthews in another Cuban revolution. Matthews was not being caught unawares, and in his own personal account of his involvement with Cuba, he observed that Castro "was a myth, a legend, a hope, but not a reality . . . and like General Gómez, he must have been saying to himself, 'without a press we shall get nowhere.' " But Matthews also remarked that "with a press [Gómez] got American intervention." In any event, Matthews and his English-born wife, Nancie, flew from New York to Havana on February 9. On the evening of Friday, February 15, the Matthewses left by car for an unspecified destination with Javier Pazos, Faustino Pérez, and Liliam Mesa; all Herbert Matthews knew was that he would meet Castro in the Sierra Maestra at midnight the following night. He did not know Faustino, who used the code name of "Luis" and was posing as the husband of "Marta," the name used by Liliam Mesa. Matthews described Marta as "young, attractive . . . from a well-to-do, upper class Havana family" and as "a fanatical member of the 26th of July Movement, typical of the young women who risked—and sometimes lost—their lives in the insurrection." Matthews then observed most accurately that "the extent to which the women of Cuba were caught up in the passion of the rebellion was extraordinary, for like all Latin women they were brought up to lead sheltered, non-public and non-political lives."

  With Marta driving, they arrived in Manzanillo sixteen hours later, on the afternoon of February 16 (Castro had reached their rendezvous spot that dawn). Matthews departed for the Sierra early in the evening, leaving Nancie behind at a Cuban family's home. The trip to the edge of the Sierra was made in Felipe Guerra Matos's jeep with Javier Pazos and two other youths; it was Felipe's third trip through army-patrolled territory that day, having first taken up Celia and Frank, then Faustino and his companions. At midnight Matthews and the others left the jeep to begin climbing up the mountain. They got lost, had to wait for two hours "in a heavy clump of trees and bushes, dripping from the rain . . . crouched in the mud . . . trying to snatch a little sleep with our heads on our knees." Then a rebel scout appeared, identified himself with two low, soft, toneless whistles, which was the guerrillas' signal, and led Matthews and his escort to the camp at Los Chorros where Castro was to meet him. At that point, Fidel's staging of the event began. In his first dispatch to the Times, Matthews wrote that "Señor Castro was encamped some distance away and a soldier went to announce our arrival and ask whether he would join us or we should join him. Later he came back with the grateful news that we were to wait and Fidel would come along with the dawn." Castro had succeeded in giving Matthews the impression that he had many camps and, as the Times article put it, "had mastery of the Sierra Maestra."

  It was theater, literally guerrilla theater, that Castro put on for Matthews. An official account of the Sierra war, published in 1979 in the Communist party newspaper Granma, says that "before entering the camp [to meet Matthews], Fidel had given instructions to his companions to adopt martial airs." But, they add, "for some it took a lot of labor to reconcile the martial air required by Fidel with the condition of their clothes and their general appearance. . . . Manuel Fajardo, for example, had no back on his shirt, torn to shreds by his knapsack harness. During the time the journalist remained in the camp, Fajardo was obliged to walk sideways." At one point, Raúl Castro brought sweat-covered Luis Crespo over to where Castro and Matthews were talking, to say, "Comandante, the liaison from Column number two has arrived," and Fidel replied airily, "Wait until I'm finished."

  As the Granma article explains, the purpose was "to impress Matthews about the total numbers of the guerrilla army, without openly telling a lie" and "finally, the journalist believed he had counted some forty fighters where there were no more than twenty and he left convinced that the group he has seen is part of a much larger force." In his Times story, Matthews quoted Castro as saying that Batista troops work in columns of two hundred, and "we in groups of ten to forty, and we are winning." Elsewhere, Matthews wrote that "the reports reaching Havana that frequent clashes were taking place and that the Government troops were losing heavily proved true." He observed that Castro had "kept the Government troops at bay while youths came in from other parts of Oriente . . . got arms and supplies and then began the series of raids and counter-attacks of guerrilla warfare," and that therefore "one got a feeling that he is now invincible."

  Matthews had no way of knowing that up to then the Rebel Army had engaged in only two very minor clashes with the army, that Castro had just barely made it across the Sierra to meet him, and that he controlled only the ground where they sat. He would never have believed that the Rebel Army consisted of only eighteen men, all of whom he saw time after time during his three hours with Castro. Matthews, however, must never be accused of being a dupe or naïve: He was in an environment totally controlled by Fidel, the Cuban leader was eminently credible, and above all he was very much in existence when Batista was still claiming him dead. In the end, Matthews was correct in concluding: "From the look of things, General Batista cannot possibly hope to suppress the Castro revolt. His only hope is that an Army column will come upon the young rebel leader and his staff and wipe them out. This is hardly likely to happen . . ."

  As soon as Matthews departed the camp to be taken back to Manzanillo, Castro resumed his discussions with the National Directorate. For four hours they covered the question of recruiting an armed contingent in Oriente cities to join the Rebel Army in the hills, with Fidel insisting on the Movement's support for the guerrilla war being its first priority. In so doing, Castro was addressing for the first time the differences of priority between the Sierra and the llano (the lowlands), differences that soon escalated to a power struggle over leadership roles within the Movement, and that led after 1959 to the liquidation of the 26th of July Movement and consolidation of the rule in Cuba by the new Communists, headed by Fidel Castro. In this sense, the political battle over the future fate of the revolution began two and a half months after the Fidelistas landed on the island and while their strength was still limited to eighteen men.

  During this conference Faustino Pérez, identified with both the Sierra and the urban insurrectional groups, proposed that a "second front" of the guerrilla war be opened in the Escambray Sierra in the central province of Las Villas in order to lessen the pres
sure on the Castro force. Faustino had in mind a 26th of July Movement guerrilla army, compatible with the Rebel Army in Oriente, and he argued that weapons more easily available in Havana could be effectively used in the Escambray. According to the version printed in the historical account in Granma, this proposal was accepted, "although Fidel was not convinced of the convenience of this idea because he considered that at this moment the important thing was to concentrate available resources in the already existing guerrillero nucleus." The version circulating privately was that Castro simply vetoed Faustino's suggestion because he saw it as a threat to his overall leadership; the Escambray was much nearer Havana than the Sierra Maestra, and it could have merged politically with the urban groups. In any event, an Escambray "second front" was established more than a year later by the Students' Revolutionary Directorate, a rival of Fidelismo, Che Guevara did not attend the conference because he was not in the National Directorate (and he was a foreigner), but he wrote that the Movement in the Sierra and in the cities "were practically two separate groups, with different tactics and strategy." He added that "there was no sign yet of the grave differences that would endanger the unity of the Movement several months later, but it was already clear that we had different concepts."

  Castro concluded the meeting by emphasizing the importance of women in the revolutionary struggle and by announcing that he would draft a manifesto to the people of Cuba for the Directorate members to take down the mountain with them. As usual, Fidel was not wasting a moment in his around-the-clock military, political, and propaganda revolutionary enterprise. He even found time to demonstrate the functioning of his beloved telescopic-sight automatic rifle to Celia Sánchez; magically, he had encountered a woman who not only shared and understood his political and philosophical concepts, but was also an expert with weapons. They were clearly made for each other.