Fidel: A Critical Portrait
Page 60
The "Total War" Manifesto declared that as of April 1, all highway and railroad traffic in Oriente province would be prohibited, and moving vehicles would be fired on. After that date it would be forbidden to pay any taxes in Cuba—to do so would be considered "unpatriotic and counterrevolutionary." At that stage, the Rebel Army had barely three hundred men under arms, but Fidel Castro's sense of drama and propaganda propelled him to announce that "from this moment, the country should consider itself in total war against the tyranny . . . the entire nation is determined to be free or perish!"
April 9 was secretly set as the general-strike date; Movement representatives were ordered to speed up their clandestine efforts, and the Rebel Army readied itself for coordinated attacks. The Fidelistas were strengthened by the arrival in late March of one of the first aircraft to land in the Sierra "Free Territory." A twin-engined C-47 transport flew in from Costa Rica with a load of arms and ammunitions—and two very important officers. One was Castro's principal military adviser, Pedro Miret, who had been under arrest in Mexico when the Granma sailed for Cuba, and was now finally able to join his companions, and the other was Huber Matos, the rice planter whose trucks took up volunteers from Manzanillo to the Sierra Maestra. Matos, who organized the flight and delivered a letter from Fidel to Costa Rica's president, was instantly given a troop command. Pedro Miret recalls that Castro was waiting for them in the meadow where the plane landed at twilight, smashing a propeller. Fidel named him to the general staff. Faustino Pérez, in the meantime, had gone back to Havana to coordinate the strike activities. Action groups in the capital were busy exploding scores of bombs every night throughout March to create a psychological climate for the general strike. This effect was enhanced by the spectacular kidnapping of world car-racing champion Juan Manuel Fangio of Argentina on the eve of a major Havana race. In an operation engineered by Faustino Pérez, Fangio was released the next day, announcing that he had been well treated. The regime was properly humiliated. In the 26th of July Movement, optimism was soaring.
Yet the strike was a terrible failure. Fidel Castro described it as the "hardest blow suffered by the Revolution during its entire trajectory" because "the people had never had as much hope as that day, and we had never had so many illusions as we had on that occasion." What happened was that for a long chain of reasons—poor planning, notably in Havana, a breakdown in coordination among various groups, bad timing, and less than adequate response and participation among the population—Castro's hopes of a precipitous revolution in the cities were skewered. The regime, which had again suspended constitutional guarantees and drafted an additional seven thousand men for the army, had been ready to smash the strike. At least one hundred Cubans were killed by the police throughout the island that day, and many hundreds were arrested. General Batista concluded that the tide had turned and that in the aftermath of the strike fiasco, the rebels in the Sierra Maestra would be demolished by a major military offensive.
One of the unresolved arguments about the general strike concerns the role of the Communist party and its relationship with the 26th of July Movement's leaders in Havana prior to the strike. Because of their basic opposition to the Castro rebellion, the Communists were charged with sabotaging the strike to provoke the downfall of the Movement, leading to a rise in their revolutionary influence and the adoption of their strategies. However, the Communist story is much more complex. No comprehensive account of the general-strike drama has ever been published—it remains an acutely sensitive topic in Cuba and therefore the reconstruction of this whole occurrence and its consequences is bound to be incomplete. Both ex-Interior Minister Ramiro Valdés and Faustino Pérez, representing different viewpoints, are still urging public silence in the controversy. There is no question, however, that the failed general strike marked a fundamental turning point in the history of the revolution. The political influence of the Movement's moderates in the llano vanished, and the assumption of total revolutionary power by Fidel Castro and his radical "militarists" in the Sierra became paramount.
As for the Communists, it was the Movement's National Workers' Front (FON) that avoided contact with the party's labor leaders, particularly influential among sugar workers, and for all practical purposes failed to include them in strike planning. FON did not give the Communists the date of the strike because it did not trust them, though the Communist party was certainly aware of what was going on. According to the Communists, the Movement's idea of a general strike was an appeal to the population to join the stoppage instantly and participate in armed attacks on preselected targets in Havana—without any preparation in plants, offices, and other workplaces. In early April the party concluded that the strike should be aborted if procedures were not improved at once, and it dispatched Osvaldo Sánchez, a Central Committee member, to the Sierra to inform Castro of the party's preoccupations. Sánchez reportedly told Fidel that the Movement leaders in Havana had overestimated their strength, failed to work at organizing the strike at work centers, refused to cooperate with the Communists, and trusted too much in a spontaneous response to strike appeals.
Six years later, on April 9, 1964, the Communist party newspaper Hoy, published for the first time a statement issued by Castro on March 26, 1958, to the effect that "in summoning the nation to the final struggle against tyranny, our Movement makes no exclusions of any kind . . . all Cuban workers, whatever are their political or revolutionary allegiances, have the right to belong to strike committees at their places of work. The National Workers' Front is not a sectarian organism. . . . The Front's leadership will coordinate with the workers' sections of political and revolutionary organizations that fight the regime, and with all the organized factions that struggle for economic and political revindications of their class, so that no worker can be severed from this patriotic effort." However, the Communists claim, the Movement never publicized Castro's instructions, and continued their unilateral activities. On April 2, the party's underground publication, Carta Semanal, called for a general strike, while noting that "the forces of disunity remain present."
In any event, Fidel Castro did not call off the strike. At ten o'clock in the morning on April 9, three Havana radio stations seized by the revolutionaries broadcast an appeal by the Movement for a "general revolutionary strike" to begin immediately. The appeal said: "Today is the day of liberation . . . all throughout Cuba at this very moment the final struggle which shall end in the overthrow of Batista has begun!" From the Sierra, the radio called out: "Strike! Strike! Strike! Everyone on strike! Everyone into the streets! . . ." Another broadcast urged patriots to "throw stones at all strikebreakers from your windows . . . throw ignited Molotov cocktails at the patrol cars . . ." But very little happened in the way of stoppages, mainly because workers were taken by surprise and the police were out in force. In Havana there were acts of sabotage, and heavy fighting developed in Sagua la Grande, a town in the central province of Las Villas. The following day, a message from Castro insisted that "all Cuba burns and erupts in an explosion of anger against the assassins, the bandits and gangsters, the informers and strikebreakers, the thugs and the military still loyal to Batista." But it was all over.
On April 13, Faustino Pérez and his Movement associates dispatched a communication to their committees in exile to acknowledge the failure and the errors committed by the urban leadership. They said the gravest errors had been to keep secret the date of the strike, then to broadcast an appeal to strike "at an hour when only housewives listen to the radio," instead of issuing the call forty-eight hours earlier. Fidel was much tougher: In a letter to Celia on April 16, he said that "the strike experience involved a great moral rout for the Movement . . . the Revolution is once again in danger and its salvation rests in our hands . . . we cannot continue to disappoint the nation's hopes. . . . No one will ever be able to make me trust the organization again. . . . I am the supposed leader of this Movement, and in the eyes of history I must take responsibility for the stupidity of others, and I am a sh
it who can decide on nothing at all. . . . I don't believe that a schism is developing in the Movement, but in the future we ourselves will resolve our own problems." Four days later, he told Celia: "We have not renounced the general strike as a decisive weapon against tyranny. . . . A battle was lost but not the war."
Now it was time for a final confrontation within the revolutionary ranks. Castro opened it with an April 25 letter to Raúl Chibás and Mario Llerena, leaders of the Movement's committee in exile in Miami, charging that "the Movement has failed utterly in the job of supplying us" and that "egotism, and at times trickery from other sectors, have combined with incompetence, negligence, and even the disloyalty of some comrades. . . . The organization has not managed to send us so much as one rifle, not one bullet from abroad. . . . But apart from all moral considerations, once again the task of saving the Revolution in one of its most profound crises falls on our men." Castro warned: "The danger of a military coup reaffirms the thesis that only the military can overthrow dictatorships, just as they first put them into power, a thesis that mires the populace in fatalistic apathy and dependence on the military . . . all this is now in the forefront as a result of the failure of the strike. And the failure of the strike was a matter not only of organization but also of the fact that our own armed action is not yet strong enough . . ."
All this set the stage for Castro's evisceration of the Movement as a political force outside his personal control. The Movement in the llano was dramatically accused of denying him resources from Cuba and abroad, although it is impossible to determine how accurate the charges were; for one thing, the first aircraft from Florida were beginning to land in the Sierra with war matériel. The twin specters of a military coup and a junta, Castro's constant fear, were raised anew. Finally, Castro washed his hands of any responsibility for the collapse of the strike he had approved in advance. The actual confrontation between the two wings of the 26th of July Movement came at a meeting of the National Directorate on May 3, at a farmhouse on the Mompié heights in the Sierra Maestra heartland. Lasting from early morning until two o'clock in the morning of the next day, the session was presided over by Fidel Castro and attended principally by the Movement's llano leaders—Faustino Pérez and Marcelo Fernández from Havana, the Santiago coordinator, René Ramos (Daniel) Latour, and the labor leader David Salvador—plus Fidel's closest personal associates in the Directorate, Celia Sánchez, Vílma Espín from Santiago, and Haydée Santamaría. Che Guevara was not a member of the National Directorate, but he was invited at the request of Faustino Pérez and Latour because they had been targets of his violent criticism in the wake of the failed strike. It marked Guevara's formal entry into the top Cuban revolutionary policy-making circles. Guevara was also the best chronicler of what he called the "Decisive Reunion."
More honest and outspoken than his companions, Guevara wrote that "the division between the sierra and llano was real . . . differences of strategic concepts separated us." Prior to the strike, Guevara noted, "the comrades from the llano constituted the majority" in the National Directorate, and they were inclined "toward certain 'civilist' actions, a certain opposition to the caudillo, who was feared [to exist] in Fidel, and to a 'militarist' faction represented by us, the people in the sierra. As a result of the Mompié meeting, where Faustino Pérez, Latour, and Salvador were virtually on trial, the "guerrilla concept" of direct military action became "triumphant with the consolidation of the prestige and authority of Fidel [who] was named commander-in-chief of the forces, including the militias, that until now were subordinated to the llano Directorate." After what Guevara describes as "an exhaustive and many times violent discussion," Faustino Pérez, Latour, and Salvador were removed from their posts in the leadership of the Movement. He wrote that "politically, the National Directorate was shifted to the Sierra Maestra where Fidel took the post of Secretary-General, and a Secretariat of five members was created."
In Havana Marcelo Fernández was made the Movement coordinator under Castro, and Faustino Pérez was replaced as a national llano leader by Delio Gómez Ochoa, a Fidel military man. Faustino, Latour, and Salvador were transferred to the Sierra, where Castro gave the first two men important responsibilities. He is not a personally vindictive man, except when he senses betrayal, and he thought that Faustino's and Latour's talents and loyalty should be fully used. Faustino, who says that he was regarded at the time as part of the "right wing" of the Movement, has remained with with Castro in the revolutionary establishment for thirty years; Latour was killed in battle four months later that year. Urrutia, already designated provisional president of Cuba, was put on salary while awaiting the summons from Caracas, where he moved from the United States (he was the only salaried Movement leader). Haydée Santamaría was sent to Miami to coordinate fund-raising in the United States. Carlos Franqui was recalled to Cuba to take over Radio Rebelde, which was beginning to broadcast to the rest of the island from the top of the Sierra Maestra, where Castro's permanent headquarters were being set up. Radio Rebelde immediately became one of Fidel's most important psychological-warfare weapons. For Che Guevara the most important outcome of the Mompié confrontation was that now "the war would be conducted militarily and politically by Fidel in his double capacity as commander-in-chief of all the forces and secretary-general of the organization."
But Guevara, despite his oft-repeated declarations of allegiance to Marxism-Leninism, remained unhappy with the Cuban Communists. In 1958 he wrote that there were "mutual fears" between the Movement and the Communist party, "and, fundamentally, the party of the workers had not perceived with sufficient clarity the role of the guerrilla nor Fidel's personal role in our revolutionary struggle." Che recalled having told a Communist leader that "you are capable of organizing cadres that are allowed to go to pieces in the darkness of a dungeon without saying a word, but you are not capable of forming cadres that can capture a machine gun nest in an assault." No matter what was said and what happened later, the top guerrilla leaders, with the possible exception of Raúl Castro, resented the Communists during most of the Sierra war. Whether or not this was part of his tactical line at that stage, Castro made a point of saying in the 1958 Look interview that "the Cuban communists . . have never opposed Batista, for whom they have seemed to feel a closer kinship." He said that Americans "should know more about Latin American movements that are democratic and nationalist. . . . Why be afraid of freeing the people, whether Hungarians or Cubans?"
Fidel Castro would go on criticizing the Communists, sometimes savagely, in public and in private; but in reconstructing the events of 1958, in terms of his own political evolution, it appears that the trauma of the aborted strikes led him to make at least a preliminary decision to go the Marxist-Leninist route. The strike revealed the political unreliability of the 26th of July Movement liberals and moderates from a revolutionary as well as an organizational viewpoint. From men and women who lived that period with Castro, the consensus emerges that he had resolved that Marxist-Leninist strategies, procedures, and techniques would in practical terms be best suited to the future of his "real" revolution. That the traditional Communist party still denied him support, these witnesses say, mattered little to Castro, who was already thinking of fashioning his own Communist party, a pretension that was not any more absurd than his original pretension of overthrowing Batista single-handed. His early Marxist sympathies evidently played a role in turning him toward this alternative, as did his resentments against the United States. More to the point, however, he thought that the Communist's organizational talents and experience with mass organizations—unlike the 26th of July Movement—could be harnessed to the revolution, with him in command. In this sense, then, there was never an ideological struggle for Fidel's soul, as some commentators have suggested. And unquestionably the entire process was irreversibly set in motion as a consequence of the April 1958 general strike.
However, now it was General Batista who decided to launch a total war. Late in 1957, an offensive designed to isolate t
he Sierra Maestra from the outside produced no meaningful results, and the Havana high command elaborated a different strategy for the May "summer offensive." This concept provided for encircling the Sierra, gradually closing the circle, and then launching the final battle and the definitive blow to Castro at his headquarters in La Plata high in the heart of the Sierra Maestra. At first, this strategy left Raúl Castro's "liberated zone" to the northeast under little more than air attacks, the assumption being that once Fidel was liquidated, the younger brother's forces would collapse sooner or later. In June, however, Raúl came under powerful air and ground assaults. The Batista plan called for advances on the central Sierra Maestra from the south, where troops were landed on the coast, from the northwest, and from the north. As many as ten thousand men, totaling fourteen battalions, were deployed in Operation FF (for Fin de Fidel, or End of Fidel) in three battle groups; they were supported by artillery, helicopters, other aircraft, and navy frigates firing on the coast from the sea.
Fidel Castro's Column 1 in the center of the Sierra had 280 armed men, including Che Guevara's force to the east, and was later reinforced by Juan Almeida's several dozen rebels recalled from the easternmost "Third Front." Batista had crushing superiority in numbers and firepower, but Castro had turned the mountains into a fortress he could defend with a much smaller force, men, who knew every path in the forest, every turn of the road, and every peasant's house in the immensely complicated terrain. Both sides knew that this would be the decisive battle of the war, and Castro realized it could be touch-and-go. He was prepared to cede territory up to a certain line protecting his La Plata headquarters, then hit back with ambushes and fight to the death. "Every entrance to the Sierra Maestra is like the pass at Thermopylae," Fidel told Venezuelan newsmen, "and every narrow passage becomes a death trap."