by Tad Szulc
In the afternoon Castro ordered the execution of the traitor, Eutimio Guerra. Incredibly, he had turned up near the farm where the Fidelistas were holding their meetings that day, evidently in the hopes that he could finally spring a lethal trap for Fidel. He did not know that he was already under suspicion. Exploring the farm's vicinity, Eutimio ran into a relative, who was in the Rebel Army, and a companion. The relative, familiar with the suspicions about Eutimio, rushed off to find Fidel, leaving Eutimio with the other man. Castro was not surprised: He had predicted Eutimio's return, and now he dispatched a squad under Juan Almeida to capture the traitor. Army safe-conduct passes were found on Eutimio, and he was manacled and taken to Fidel's camp. Raúl wrote that the rebels' first idea was to turn Eutimio into a "triple agent" working against the army, but he refused. Then Fidel interrogated him at length (Raúl commented later that "he might have given us more information if we tortured him, but we did not apply such methods even to such miserable people"). A tremendous storm exploded overhead with thunder and lightning, and at 7:00 P.M. Eutimio Guerra was shot to death.
Castro spent the next three days at the farmhouse drafting his Manifesto, the "Appeal to the People of Cuba" to be distributed throughout the island about the time the Matthews articles appeared in The New York Times. The approach was reminiscent of Martí's dealings with Bryson: first the interview, then the carefully drafted document for publication in the Herald. In this instance, Fidel calculated that the Matthews reportage would establish the fact that he was, indeed, alive—and that this in itself would be a sensation—and then the Manifesto would be circulated with enormously enhanced credibility. Also, it would be the first formal document of the 26th of July Movement to be issued from the Sierra Maestra, making it absolutely clear that Fidel Castro alone was the Commander in Chief of the revolution.
The visiting Movement leaders had brought newspapers and magazines with them, and Fidel (who normally depended on his battery-powered radio for news) was able to catch up with affairs elsewhere. Among the events reported in the Havana press was the ceremony at which United States Ambassador Arthur Gardner presented seven Sherman tanks to General Batista, and referred to Castro as a "rabble-rouser." The same week, the aircraft carrier Leyte and four destroyers paid an official visit to Havana. The American policy remained one of unquestioned support for the regime, it having never occurred to the administration that a wholly new situation was developing on the island. Even without reading about these latest acts showing United States support for Batista, Castro had complained to Matthews that the regime was using American weapons not only against him, but "against all the Cuban people. . . . They have bazookas, mortars, machine guns, planes and bombs." Answering a follow-up question, Castro said: "You can be sure we have no animosity toward the United States and the American people."
It is understandable, then, that Castro reacted with rage upon learning that Colonel Carlos M. Tabernilla y Palmero, the head of the air force that had been bombing and strafing the rebels and Sierra peasants, was awarded the United States Legion of Merit by Air Force Major General Truman Landon. The American general flew to Havana to present the decoration to Tabernilla (whose father was the Cuban Army's Chief of Staff) for "the furtherance of amicable relations between the Cuban Air Force and the United States Air Force from May, 1955, to February, 1957." At the same time, the U.S. Congress was informed that between 1955 and 1957, the United States had delivered to Cuba 7 tanks, a battery of light mountain howitzer artillery, 4,000 rockets, 40 heavy machine guns, 3,000 M-1-caliber semiautomatic rifles, 15,000 hand grenades, 5,000 mortar grenades, and 100,000 .50-caliber armor-piercing cartridges for machine guns.
At the farm, Fidel and his men had an opportunity to read the Movement's clandestine newspaper, Revolución, which Carlos Franqui, a former Communist and an early Fidelista, had been publishing in Havana on an irregular basis since mid-1956. The issue, printed late in January with the headline FIDEL IN THE SIERRA, had been sent to Santiago to be reprinted, and the total circulation was said to have been twenty thousand copies. Frank País and Vilma Espín, took some copies to Castro and the guerrillas feasted their eyes on it while they waited for Herbert Matthews's bombshell to burst.
This happened a week later on Sunday, February 24. The most vital part as far as the guerrillas were concerned was in the opening sentences: "Fidel Castro, the rebel leader of Cuba's youth, is alive and fighting hard and successfully in the rugged, almost impenetrable vastness of the Sierra Maestra. . . . Batista has the cream of his Army around the area, but the Army men are fighting a thus-far losing battle to destroy the most dangerous enemy General Batista has yet faced in a long and adventurous career as a Cuban leader and dictator." Elsewhere, Matthews wrote: "The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men adored him and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the youth of Cuba all over the island. Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership."
Predictably, the impact of the Matthews articles (the Times printed three of them on successive days) was immense. Because censorship in Cuba had been lifted that week, Matthews's stories were reprinted in the national press, instantly elevating Castro to hero status. The Batista regime made matters even worse for itself when Defense Minister Santiago Verdeja issued a statement on the day after the last article, claiming that Matthews had written "a chapter in a fantastic novel," that he had not interviewed "the pro-Communist insurgent, Fidel Castro," and that even if Castro was alive, he commanded "no supporting forces." This was compounded by the remark that if the interview had taken place, there would have been a corroborating photograph of Matthews and Castro. The Times, of course, did have such a photograph and published it the following day, but even then Batista disbelieved it. In his memoirs written in exile, Batista admitted that "I, myself, influenced by the statements of the High Command, doubted [the interview's] authenticity. . . . Castro was beginning to be a legendary personage and would end by being a monster of terror." The Matthews visit was a major turning point in Castro's career, and subsequently a magazine in New York published a cartoon of Fidel, underneath which was the newspaper's advertising slogan, "I Got My Job Through The New York Times." Today, Herbert Matthews is a forgotten man in Cuba: only oldtimers like Faustino Pérez remember him fondly, and Castro no longer mentions him.
Dated February 20, Castro's "Appeal to the People of Cuba" was a call for violent action throughout the island in support of the revolution for which, "if necessary, we shall fight in the Sierra Maestra for ten years." This was a moment of great weakness for the eighteen-man army, but Castro, having already mounted his guerrilla theater for Herbert Matthews, knew how to appear powerful and victorious. In his mastery of the use of propaganda to mobilize resources, he had learned well from Martí and Lenin, his favorite authors.
The six-point revolutionary program Castro signed on behalf of the Movement urged "intensification in the burning of sugarcane . . . to deprive the tyranny of the revenue with which it pays the soldiers it sends to their death and buys the planes and bombs with which it assassinates scores of Sierra Maestra families." He asked, "What does a little hunger matter today to conquer bread and freedom tomorrow?" After the cane is burned, he wrote, "we shall burn sugar in the warehouses . . ." The next point proposed "general sabotage of all the public services." Then Castro called for the "summary and direct execution of the thugs who torture and assassinate revolutionaries . . . and all those who pose an obstacle to the Revolutionary Movement." He demanded the creation of "civic resistance" in all the Cuban cities and a "general revolutionary strike as the final and culminating point in the struggle." The document was retyped, and the Movement leaders made their way home to Manzanillo, Santiago, and Havana with copies of the "Appeal" concealed on them.
At this juncture, Castro was not interested in taking ideological positions, and his "Appeal" steered clear of them, much more so than had "History Will Absolve Me." He wa
s concerned with the physical aspects of the struggle against Batista, with the inadequacy of his guerrilla band, and with the Movement's inability to bring other revolutionary groups into its fold (and under its control). The question of unity—and unified leadership—was increasingly on Fidel's mind, and he was careful not to upset the volatile revolutionary politics with unnecessary statements and proclamations about his future plans. Proclamations could await a more favorable political climate and greater power. This is why, for example, he chose to disassociate himself personally from a detailed program drafted by Mario Llerena, the Movement's director of public relations in exile (named by Frank País, not by Castro), but not brought up to the mountains for his approval. Instead, he put all the pressure behind the organization of the Civic Resistance Movement along the lines of his own "Appeal," and this became extremely successful. Returning from the Sierra conference, Armando Hart and Faustino Pérez made this project a priority, and the clandestine Civic Resistance turned into a key adjunct of the 26th of July Movement. Concentrating on propaganda, fund-raising, and general support activities, it was meant to attract those who were ready and able to help but not to fight.
For Castro's Rebel Army, the next three months were a period of expansion, preparation, and immense hardship. For another group of revolutionaries in Havana, it was a time of pure tragedy and grief. In terms of the overall contest between Batista and all his opponents, it was also a time of stalemate. Army troops could not destroy the guerrillas, nor could the police in the cities smash the clandestine organizations involved in sabocage, propaganda, and support for the Sierra Maestra fighters. Castro, on the other hand, was too weak to venture out of his constantly changing mountain hideouts. For Batista not to be winning, however, was for the regime to be losing; each day the rebels continued to operate, the greater the danger to the dictatorship. As Fidel told his men in mid-March, "On three occasions we have almost perished . . . the enemy threatens us everywhere, while denying our presence here. . . . We have only twelve rifles and forty rounds of ammunition for each of us, but we have fulfilled our promise to the Cuban people. . . . We are here! . . ."
While Castro was compulsively optimistic, for Che Guevara these were "the bitter days . . . the most painful stage in the war." A series of asthma attacks had virtually paralyzed him, hitting him on the third day of the march when he had run out of his adrenaline-based medicine. Although they were walking slowly, Guevara could not keep up. On a day when the army mortars attacked the rebels, the retreat was easy, but it had to be fast, and Guevara wrote, "My asthma attack was such that it was actually difficult for me to take a step." Luis Crespo, their best Sierra man, dragged Che and both their rifles and equipment for hours on end, muttering affectionately, "Walk, walk, you fucking Argentine, or I'll give you the butt of my rifle . . ." Later, at a shack in a place called Purgatorio, Castro introduced himself to the owner as "Major González of the Cuban Army" in the presence of another peasant. The peasant criticized "that rebel Fidel Castro" for a spell, and departed. Castro then told the owner his true identity. The old man embraced him warmly and offered to go to Manzanillo to buy medicine for Guevara. Castro moved on with his group, leaving Che behind with a young rebel and the outfit's best rifle. The old peasant returned with the medicine, Che spent ten days walking back to the farmhouse, leaning on every tree trunk and on his rifle, while the young soldier "had a heart attack each time my asthma made me cough . . ."
When Frank País left the Sierra after his meetings with Castro, he promised to have a group of volunteers at the same farm on March 5, two weeks later. Fifty-eight recruits from Santiago and Manzanillo, led by Captain Jorge Sotús, reached the farmhouse on March 25, three weeks behind schedule, and only thirty of them had weapons. Among the recruits were three young Americans, sons of servicemen from the Guantánamo naval base: Charles Ryan, Victor Buehlman, and Michael Garney. Now, Castro observed, the Rebel army was almost back to its original strength of eighty-two when the Granma landed. This latest contingent was organized and sent up the Sierra by Celia Sánchez from the secret staging area she had set up at a small farm known as La Rosalia, a block from the Manzanillo city jail. She had the men hide inside clumps of bushes (there were no trees on the farm) for several days. Then they were loaded in small groups aboard trucks belonging to a rice farmer and part-time teacher named Huber Matos, an active Movement member, to be taken to the edge of the Sierra. From there, the inexperienced recruits climbed up to the rebel outposts.
While Fidel and his men waited at the farm for Sotús's column, they learned from radio news broadcasts on March 13 that an attack on the presidential palace in Havana by the Students' Revolutionary Directorate (DR) had failed. At least thirty-five DR members were killed at the palace, the DR's president, José Antonio Echeverría, was shot dead in an affray near the university, while scores of others were captured, tortured, and murdered. Pelayo Cuervo Navarro, a very well-known Ortodoxo party leader, was assassinated in his luxury Havana neighborhood. In a manifesto written on the eve of the attack, Echeverría stressed that his intentions stemmed from "our commitment to the people of Cuba [which] was established by the Mexico City Pact, which joined our youth in conduct and action." This was the accord he and Fidel ironed out and signed on behalf of the DR and the 26th of July Movement, respectively, when Echeverría went to Mexico in September 1956 to see Castro. No specific actions were assigned to either side, but Castro and Echeverría were so clearly rivals for national revolutionary leadership that any major move by one instantly triggered psychological and political pressure on the other to match it. At the same time, the two young leaders represented different societal groups with all the implications this carried in Cuba: Castro had chosen to lead a working-class constituency with the aid of a handful of intellectuals, while Echeverría spoke for the young Cuban middle class—and a sprinking of middle-class, intellectual veterans of the Republican army in the Spanish civil war.
In the context of their rivalries, Castro had made the first spectacular move when he invaded Cuba in December and was able to survive and grow in the months that followed. The DR, meanwhile, was unable to mobilize an uprising in Havana to support the landing. Castro's standing was immensely enhanced by the Matthews articles in the Times. It was therefore logical that in his manifesto Echeverría said that "the circumstances necessary for our youth to carry out its assigned role were not forthcoming at the right time, forcing us to postpone the fulfillment of our obligation." He added: "We think that the moment has now come. We are confident that the purity of our motives will bring us God's favor so that we may achieve the rule of justice in our country." Many years after the revolution, at a commemoration of the palace attack, Castro grabbed the microphone to protest furiously when the chairman of the event omitted Echeverría's mention of God in reading his manifesto. Fidel had had fundamental differences with the student leader about almost everything, but he felt it was insulting to the memory of Echeverría to excise the exhortation to God.
Among the many mysteries of that day in March is why the DR and Echeverría chose this particular moment and this particular type of action to assert their commitment to the revolutionary bargain and to their political machismo. It is not absolutely certain that the idea of storming the palace and killing Batista actually came from this student of architecture, Echeverría; he did not personally lead the assault on the palace, being instead in command of a simultaneous strike on a radio station. It remains unclear exactly how the weapons were obtained for the palace coup and by whom they were financed; it may well have been done by wealthy Cuban political exiles, and Echeverría and his companions may have been persuaded (or dared) to kill the dictator. The DR had already engaged in selective political assassination, and secret sponsors of the action against Batista may have surmised that the students would apply it to the usurper in the palace. The day's attacks were superbly planned and their executors were supremely heroic—it all failed because Batista was barricaded on the third floor of the palace
when the students took the second floor, to be dislodged later by powerful army reinforcements. Had the attack succeeded, it would have left Fidel Castro in his mountains as a suddenly irrelevant factor in the revolutionary equation.
According to one version of these events, it was claimed that the DR had amassed arms in Havana not only to kill Batista, but also to block Castro's attempts to seize power in the capital once the dictatorship was overthrown in one fashion or another. This is reasonably credible because weapons for the DR's second Escambray front established the following year came from caches in Havana, and because armed DR units did capture the presidential palace after Batista fled the country on the last day of 1958, to prevent Castro from taking it.
In any case, Castro and the leadership of the 26th of July Movement had little use for the DR and its tactics. Faustino Pérez, who had just returned from the Sierra Maestra, is said to have declined a DR invitation for the Movement to participate in the attack on the palace; the decision, however, would have been Pérez's own because Castro was unaware of these plans and there would have been no time to communicate with him. Fidel himself did not hide his absolute disapproval of the DR action, making it clear that he thought it was part of the overall leadership struggle. In a radio interview with an American reporter a month after the DR assault, he said it was "a useless spilling of blood. The life of the dictator does not matter . . . I am against terrorism. I condemn these procedures. Nothing is solved by them. Here in the Sierra Maestra is where they should come to fight." But Castro was consistent in his views against political assassination as a revolutionary instrument. Twenty years later, discussing the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he returned to the theme, saying that "we have never believed in the assassination of leaders . . . we fought a war against Batista for twenty-five months, but we were not trying to kill Batista. It would have been easier to kill Batista than to assault the Moncada, but we did not believe that the system is abolished, liquidated, by liquidating the leaders when it was the system that we opposed. We were fighting against reactionary ideas, not against men."
