Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  Castro's disparaging comments nevertheless emphasized the leadership issue. When he said the students should have come to the Sierra Maestra to fight, he obviously meant for them to be under his command. Ironically, Cuban Communists also came out against the DR attack on the palace, putting it under the same heading as Fidel Castro's guerrilla operations. Four days after the assault, Juan Marinello, chairman of the Communist Popular Socialist Party and a minister in the Batista government in the 1940s, wrote Herbert Matthews that "our position is very clear; we are against these methods." Marinello wrote that there was no need for "a popular insurrection," and what Cuba needed was "democratic elections," and "a government of a Democratic Front of National Liberation" which the Communists would have attempted to dominate. Therefore, Marinello informed Matthews that "we think that [the 26th of July Movement] has noble aims but that, in general, it is following mistaken tactics. For that reason we do not approve of its actions, but we call on all parties and popular sectors to defend it against the blows of tyranny . . ." The Communists' position had not changed from November to March despite Castro's ability to survive, and, like Batista, they were not taking him seriously. This is worth noting in the light of subsequent official propaganda claims that the Communists were supposedly helping the guerrillas in 1957.

  Another unanswered question, this time involving the Communists, was the "Crime at 7 Humboldt Street." This was the address of a safe-house apartment in Havana where the surviving leaders of the students' attack on the presidential palace had hidden during Easter Week. The leaders were Fructuoso Rodríguez, who was elected president of the University Students' Federation (FEU) after Echeverría's death, and Joe Westbrook (who was with Echeverría at the radio station), José Machado, and Juan Pedro Carbó Serví. On April 20, Easter Sunday, the four were killed by the secret police after the location of the apartment was given them by an inside informant. After the triumph of the revolution, it developed that the traitor was a student named Marcos Armando "Marquito" Rodríguez. Marquito had extremely close personal ties to the top leaders of the "old" Communist party, although he was not believed to be a party member at the time. In 1964, Marquito Rodríguez, who in the meantime had been favored with a university scholarship in Prague, was arrested and tried. At the trial, Fidel Castro acted in effect as the prosecutor, and Rodríguez was found guilty of the Humboldt Street treason and ultimately executed. The Communists were never specifically linked with Rodríguez's actions, but the names of all his powerful friends in the "old" Communist party surfaced at the trial, Rodríguez having confessed his crime to them in exile in Mexico. As it happened, most were purged by Castro in 1962 for leading a "sectarian clique" against him inside the new Communist party he was then forming. The "old" Communists were a classic Moscow-oriented party, and it was never clearly explained why the leaders had not informed Castro earlier of the Rodríguez treason "confession," if that was the case, and why it took the revolutionary regime five years to discover the truth about one of the most painful and dramatic episodes of the struggle against Batista. But Castro has always had his ways of sending messages.

  In the meantime, Fidel was shaping his strengthened guerrilla army into an effective fighting force, teaching the new recruits the secrets of irregular warfare, getting them accustomed to difficult marches and other hardships. He rejected Che Guevara's recommendation for engaging into immediate combat as he did not think the men were ready for a major encounter; he waited two months for the right moment. For the time being, it was a nomadic life, moving camp almost every day, marching at night, and sometimes going without sleep for days. Food was short, and, as Che told the story, one day the rebels had to eat their first horse. It was an "exquisite" meal for some of them, and "a test for the biased stomachs of the peasants who thought they were committing an act of cannibalism while chewing the old friend of man."

  Late in April, Castro was joined in the mountains by Robert Taber and Wendell Hoffman of the Columbia Broadcasting System. Castro, who had asked for more American journalists after the success of the Matthews trip, did not know who Taber and Hoffman were until they arrived (he only had a brief message that American journalists were on their way up the Sierra), or how complicated it was to deliver them and their bulky television equipment to the Oriente hideouts. Armando Hart and Haydée Santamarí were in charge of the Havana arrangements, but Hart was arrested, and Haydée drove the Americans to Bayamo with Marcelo Fernández, the Havana coordinator of the 26th of July Movement (Haydée had managed to hold on to several thousand pesos in collected funds Hart was carrying). In Bayamo they met Celia Sánchez and Carlos Iglesias, a Movement leader from Santiago, and the six traveled together to Manzanillo and up to the Sierra.

  The American television team and Celia and Haydée remained with the guerrillas for nearly two months while Castro concentrated on building a logistics and supply system in the region. Food depots were set up in peasant houses to receive shipments from the lowlands, permanent camps were built for the guerrilleros for use during their constant moves, and peasant liaison teams were organized to serve as couriers and a rudimentary intelligence service. Locations were selected where Castro and the others could contact the local population. At this stage, the rebels were beginning to control an ever-expanding area in the Sierra that they called the "Free Territory."

  Then the entire column climbed Pico Turquino, Cuba's highest mountain, for Castro to hold a CBS television interview in front of the bust of José Martí that Celia Sánchez and her father had installed there many years earlier. He said: "We have struck the spark of the Cuban Revolution." Che Guevara noted that Castro, who had never been there before, checked his pocket altimeter atop Turquino to assure himself that it was exactly as high as shown on the maps; he never trusted anybody or anything. By reaching Turquino, Castro had shifted his operations back to the central part of the Sierra Maestra where he felt more protected and where he could develop a better infrastructure for what he now thought would be a protracted war. Less is known of the strategic planning by the Batista high command—and their battle projections at the time—because in the euphoria of revolutionary victory the crowds destroyed key military archives in Havana and at Bayamo.

  Because Castro's presence in Cuba was becoming both an accomplished fact and a major element in all the political calculations, other rivals sought to challenge his sway. Former President Carlos Prío financed an expedition of twenty-seven men, led by a United States Army veteran named Calixto Sánchez, to establish a separate anti-Batista guerrilla front in the mountains in the north of Oriente. Cuban politics being what they were (and Prío being as wealthy as he was), there was no real contradiction in financing Castro in Mexico, and then a competitive operation later; Prío wanted his fingers in every pie. The group sailed from Miami aboard the yacht Corintia on May 19, landed in Cuba on May 24, and were betrayed by a peasant to the army on May 28. Twenty-four men, including several DR members, were caught and shot.

  The war continued therefore to be Castro's show. On the same day the Corintia expedition was liquidated, Fidel led his men into combat for the first time since January. This was the battle of Uvero on May 28, when the Rebel Army moved the farthest east to take a government garrison on the Caribbean coast. Castro's principal reason for his eastward shift was a message from Santiago that Movement couriers would place an important shipment of modern arms at a specific point in the Sierra Maestra, east of Turquino, for his forces to recover. But as usual there were delays, and the cache was not found until May 20. In the meantime, Che Guevara got lost for a day (thereby discovering that a compass is not enough in the Sierra, and that a knowledge of the terrain is essential), the rebels executed a Batista spy they had caught, and another American journalist, Andrew St. George, joined the Castro column. Additional peasants also signed up with the rebels (in each case, Fidel interviewed volunteers at length about their backgrounds and motivations before accepting them), and toward the end of May, the Fidelistas were up to 120 men. But it w
as the new weapons that gladdened Castro's heart: three tripod-mounted machine guns, three submachine guns, and nineteen automatic rifles, including American M-1s. Che Guevara was handed a submachine gun, becoming for the first time a full-time fighter; until then had spent most of his time as a physician for the troops and the peasants in the villages they crossed, fighting only when necessary. Despite this, the impression Guevara conveys of himself in his war diary is one of toughness and mercilessness. He relates, for example, an incident just before the Uvero battle when the rebels caught a Batista army corporal with an unsavory record. "Some of us," Guevara wrote, "proposed his execution, but Fidel refused to do anything to him." Castro was always willing to shoot traitors, spies, deserters, and rapists, but not war prisoners. Che also, according to his own recollections, ordered the shooting of a peasant guerrillero who turned out to be a thief, then began passing himself off as Che Guevara, pretending he was a physician and demanding, "Bring me women. I'm going to examine them all . . ."

  The Uvero battle was extremely tough and costly: Of the eighty rebels, six were killed and nine wounded (including Juan Almeida, a general-staff officer); of the fifty-three army personnel, fourteen were killed, nineteen wounded, and fourteen taken prisoner. It was the bloodiest encounter since Alegría de Pío, starting at dawn and lasting nearly three hours, but this time the Fidelistas won. They took two machine guns and forty-six rifles, and Castro declared that "thus began a new phase in the Sierra Maestra." Che looked after the enemy wounded and, according to Fidel, left them "in the care of their own doctor, so that the army might pick them up and move them to their own hospitals, thanks to which none of them died." Pedro Álvarez Tabío, the military historian, says that Uvero "had a very important strategic significance because it demonstrated for the first time to the rebel fighters . . . that the Rebel Army could defeat the army of the tyranny, and that the seizure of power through a military defeat of the army was possible."

  Immediately after Uvero, Celia Sánchez left the Sierra with the CBS team, continuing on to Santiago, where Herbert Matthews was visiting on his return to Cuba. Castro wanted her to bring Matthews up-to-date on rebel activities. She had, however, taken part in the Uvero battle, the first woman to fight with the Rebel Army. Four months would elapse before she would return, as she was needed in Manzanillo to coordinate the flow of men, arms, and supplies to the Sierra. Addressing her by her underground name, "Norma," Fidel wrote Celia shortly after she left the mountain: "We have such pleasant memories of your presence here that one feels your absence has left a real vacuum. Even when a woman goes around the mountains with a rifle in hand, she always makes our men tidier, more decent, gentlemanly—and even braver. And after all, they are really decent and gentlemanly all the time. But what would your poor father say . . ." After hearing a false report that Celia had been detained, Castro had Raúl, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, and other top fighters sign a letter, addressed to Norma, declaring that "you and David [Frank País] are our basic pillars. If you and he are well, all goes well and we are tranquil . . ." A formal statement by the rebel commanders proclaimed that "concerning the sierra, when the history of this revolutionary epoch is written, two names must be printed on the cover: David and Norma." Che Guevara wrote that Celia "constituted our only known and safe contact . . . her detention would mean isolation for us." Without her, Cuban history might have been different.

  Frank País was killed by the Batista police in Santiago on July 30. Castro wrote Celia Sánchez the following day that "for the moment, you'll have to assume for us, a good portion of Frank's work, especially as you know more about it than anybody else." País was not only the Movement's principal leader in Oriente from the standpoint of providing logistics support for the Rebel Army in the mountains, but, increasingly, a political thinker on a national scale—possibly the best revolutionary mind, after Fidel Castro, in Cuba (Che Guevara was an Argentine and at that stage still tended to stay away from overall Cuban strategies). País's death was a particularly telling blow to the Movement because it now found itself in the midst of a fundamental political crisis.

  The growth of the Fidelista army and the expansion of the "Free Territory" pitted Castro in the mountains against the urban wings of the Movement in a struggle for revolutionary leadership and policy-making. By July, the guerrilla army had grown to two hundred men whom the Batista armed forces simply could not dislodge, and the earlier Sierra-lowlands frictions turned into an acute if muted dispute. Castro took the view that the first and foremost priority of the Movement in the lowlands was to support the guerrilla army. This implied, of course, the Movement's acceptance of his national leadership, and Fidel was as ready to fight for this as he was to fight Batista. In letters to Celia in July and August, Castro insisted: "The proper order should now be: All guns, all bullets, and all supplies to the Sierra." In the cities, however, the feeling was growing that Castro should share decision-making with the National Directorate, ostensibly because he was too isolated in the mountains to be sufficiently informed about events in Cuba, but really because many Movement leaders thought they, too, were entitled to a voice in the country's future. Not only were they sending arms, money, and supplies to Castro, they argued, but the 26th of July Movement and the Civic Resistance were also assisting him through sabotage efforts against the economy—blowing up utility plants, factories, and government offices, and torching sugarcane fields—and scores of these clandestine fighters were being killed, arrested, and tortured in the cities.

  Having barely consolidated his military position in the Sierra Maestra after the Uvero battle, Fidel Castro now had to turn his attention to the emerging political struggle within revolutionary ranks. Although Castro knew what was coming, it was Frank País who finally forced him to face the political problem. Constituting, in effect, the principal link between the Sierra and the llano, País wrote Castro a long letter early in July informing him that because of the vast chaos and confusion reigning in the Movement throughout Cuba, he and Armando Hart had "decided on an audacious move to revamp the Movement in its entirety."

  The significant aspects of this decision were that Castro had not been consulted beforehand, which in itself was a challenge to his authority, and that País was now telling him that "the leadership would be centralized for the first time in the hands of a few, the distinct responsibilities and tasks of the Movement would be clearly assigned." Though País spoke of poor coordination within the Movement as the reason for the changes, it was clear that his concept was to divide power between the mountain and the cities; for example, that the National Directorate would include the six provincial coordinators. The Rebel Army would be represented by one delegate. Moreover, he stressed that one of the "defects" of the Movement was the "lack of a clear and precisely outlined program, which is, at the same time, serious, revolutionary, and within the range of achievement." País then informed Castro that he had already ordered the drafting of such a program by a group of intellectuals. Finally, he urged the creation of armed Movement militias nationwide. Again, Castro saw prerogatives taken away from him by the twenty-two-year-old Santiago leader. To be sure, País respectfully told Fidel that "you will all decide on this, but I ask that your opinion be communicated to this Directorate as rapidly as possible."

  Whether or not Castro suspected in Frank País a potential or actual rival for leadership—or at least a very independent voice (official Cuban accounts insist that País was a devoted Castro disciple)—he did understand the developing situation. Even before País's communication, he summoned to his side two respected moderates of an older generation, Raúl Chibás and Felipe Pazos, and used their prestige to enhance his own political standing in the country. A great tactician, Castro chose for the moment to form a highly visible alliance with the political center (the ever-outspoken Che Guevara described it as "the makings of treason" in his diary, bad-mouthing Chibás and Pazos as natural betrayers of the Revolution). However, Castro used both men only until they became expendable after 19
59. The Communists still believed that the Movement was "putschist, adventurist, and petit bourgeois," and in any event public collaboration with them did not yet suit Castro.

  Chibás, an unassuming, quiet, but courageous man, recalls the circumstances of his arrival in the Sierra on July 4, after meeting with Frank País in Santiago and Celia Sánchez in Manzanillo. País was disturbed that "Fidel was making so many decisions . . . it was a caudillo problem, that Fidel was making decisions without considering an existing Directorate." Chibás was guided to a house in the mountains to await Castro, who then arrived with his column of some 160 men, followed by Che Guevara with a contingent of wounded rebels. The scene, he says, "was like something out of the movies, watching them coming, taking positions all around, and all in complete silence because there everything was in whispers. I spent a month speaking in whispers: It was their discipline, the difference between the Rebel Army and the Batista army. The Batista army always arrived shouting, and it was easy to surprise them because it was known they were there. But the rebels had their own ways. For example, if it was an open field, only one person would cross it at a time, so if a plane came overhead, it looked like a peasant walking over a field. Then, the next man would cross."

  In his long talks with Castro, whom he had known for nearly ten years, Chibás insisted that elections be called in Cuba within a year of the victory over Batista. He told him that with control over the congress, "all the necessary revolutionary laws can be passed." Chibás emphasizes that Castro agreed with the electoral concept and that "nobody forced him" to accept it. The Sierra Maestra Manifesto, issued on July 12, was a result of Castro's meetings with Chibás and Pazos, and was signed by all three. It declared that within a year "we want elections, but with one condition: truly free, democratic and impartial elections." It represented Castro's firm and formal commitment to "free, democratic elections" as the central point of the Manifesto that he intended to be the Movement's program, thus superseding Frank País's manifesto in Santiago. Two years later, Castro would break that commitment in the euphoric climate of revolutionary victory on the island when he offered successive rationalizations why no elections were needed in Cuba.