Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  When the government forces began to attack on May 20, Castro had entered what Guevara described as a "sedentary phase," expanding the La Plata headquarters, and consolidating and organizing the "Free Territory" administratively and politically. Not far from La Plata, Che Guevara set up a Rebel Army recruits' school at Minas del Frío where new volunteers were trained by a former Batista army captain. The headquarters, called comandancia, was in a large forest clearing on the crest of the Sierra Maestra that could be reached solely up a tortuous, narrow path, studded with rocks and boulders and usually covered with mud. It was an extraordinarily tough climb, and mules could be used only a part of the way.

  Wooden structures erected in La Plata were concealed by tree branches above for protection from air attacks, and each structure was so cleverly located inside the forest at the edge of the clearing that one could not spot it even in daylight until coming upon it. Castro's house was built solidly against the side of a ravine over a creek, and it had an escape route down a long ladder to the creek if it were attacked through the entrance. The house consisted of a bedroom with a double bed for Fidel and Celia and a single chair, a room serving as an office for Celia, a deck where Castro often received visitors, and a kitchen. Nearby was the building were Faustino Pérez ran his civil affairs office for the "liberated territories," then a hospital, a guest house, and a structure for the women's combat regiment. In this building the women had a score of sewing machines which they used to make uniforms, but often they dropped their sewing, grabbed their rifles, and went into combat. The first battle of this Mariana Grajales detachment (named after the patriotic mother of Generals Antonio and José Maceo of the independence wars) occurred in September 1958, northwest of La Plata. The first house in the clearing was the office of a bearded dentist named Luis Borges who became a guerrilla officer. He was responsible for the men's teeth and for ammunition stores. Castro, who had bad teeth, was a frequent customer, and more than once received visitors and battle reports while the dentist worked in his mouth with a pedal-activated drill. Several hundred feet above the clearing was the studio and antenna of the rebel radio, which served both as a broadcasting station and as Castro's link with Caracas, Mexico, Miami, and points in Cuba. Finally, a field-telephone network was established between La Plata and a number of outlaying rebel positions, lessening the dependence on couriers for every message.

  The Batista offensive lasted seventy-six days before being decisively beaten back by the Fidelistas. The rebels several times came very close to defeat when the army captured most of their positions and villages around La Plata. June 19, Castro said, was the "most critical day," as he gambled everything on preventing the Batista soldiers from dislodging his forces from the crest of the Sierra Maestra. So long as he held the long crest, the rebels could fire down on the enemy and keep them in check. Army battilions repeatedly attempted to cross a river near Santo Domingo and scale the range, but each time they were beaten back by the rifles, machine guns, and mortars of no more than forty rebels deployed along the crest. Castro, who raced with Celia and his aide, Arturo Aguilera, by jeep or on foot from spot to spot, was at times so close to enemy troops that he could count individual soldiers as he stared down at them with his binoculars. Fidel also applied psychological warfare for the first time in the Sierra war during this battle by installing loudspeakers that blared the national anthem, patriotic songs, and revolutionary exhortations at the exhausted Batista soldiers. He thinks it helped to sap their morale. In any event, the offensive ended.

  It was a violent and vicious war, but Castro and some of the Batista commanders developed an old-fashioned gentlemanly relationship that Fidel, in particular, enjoyed. At the outset of the enemy offensive, he received a communication from General Eulogio Cantillo, the chief of the Batista forces in the region, inviting him, in effect, to surrender. Castro answered instantly: "I think highly of you. My opinion is not incompatible with my having the honor of recognizing you as an adversary. . . . I appreciate your noble feelings toward us, who are, after all, your compatriots, not your enemies, because we are not at war against the armed forces, but against the dictatorship. . . . Perhaps when the offensive is over, if we are still alive, I will write you again to clarify my thinking and to tell you what I think of you, the army, and we can do for the benefit of Cuba . . ." Che Guevara took a dim view of this exchange.

  Earlier in July, before the rebels repulsed the Batista offensive, Castro defeated a battalion led by Major José Quevedo that had landed on the coast with orders to storm the Sierra up La Plata River. The force surrendered to the rebels at the battle of El Jigüe, but first Castro wrote the major, whom he knew as a fellow law student at Havana University. It was difficult to imagine, he said, "that someday we would be fighting against each other, despite the fact that perhaps we do not even harbor different feelings about the fatherland. . . . I have used harsh words in judging the actions of many, and of the army in general, but never have my hands or those of my companions been stained with the blood nor have we debased ourselves by the mistreatment of any soldier taken prisoner. . . . I write these lines on the spur of the moment, without telling you or asking you for anything, only to greet you and to wish you, very sincerely, good luck." Five days later, Castro sent Quevedo another message that "your troops are surrounded, they have not the slightest hope of being saved. . . . In this situation, I offer you an honorable, dignified surrender. . . . All your men will be treated with the greatest respect and consideration. The officers will be permitted to keep their weapons." But Quevedo kept fighting, and on July 19, Castro sent one of his men to ask him to surrender to save lives on both sides; he broadcast a radio appeal to the Quevedo battalion to give up, promising them special treatment; and then he went to meet the major. When Quevedo finally surrendered on July 21, the rebels took 220 prisoners, Castro entered the camp, and ordered Ramiro Valdés: "Have all the officers keep their side arms. Make sure that nobody tries to take them away from them." Then he sent a message to Guevara to "try to have them prepare lunch" for the prisoners at the Mompié hill before their release. The prisoners were turned over to the International Red Cross three days later, and Che Guevara arrived on his little mule to watch. Castro raced across the mountains to fight at Santo Domingo.

  On August 12 both Fidel and Che were at Las Mercedes to observe the delivery of some one hundred prisoners from another Batista unit to the Red Cross. They met the army colonel representing his side at the ceremony, and had coffee together and chatted amiably. The colonel said he thought the rebels would win in the end, "but you will find a destroyed Cuba" When Castro showed interest in the colonel's helicopter parked outside, the officer invited the rebels to fly around with him. With Che, Celia, and a rebel captain, Fidel flew over the Sierra for fifteen minutes, having a marvelous time and spotting places he knew. It was his first time aboard a helicopter, however, and his horrified aides were concerned for his safety; "it was a Fidel-type thing," Colonel Aguilera said. From Las Mercedes, Castro returned to the comandancia to plan the rebel counteroffensive—which would become the final offensive of the war. As Aguilera remembers, "Celia never left him, Celia always was with him." The only times they separated was when Castro wanted her to solve some specific Rebel Army problem at La Plata when he had to make a dash to a unit caught up in sudden combat. Others remember that Celia's slacks and blouse pockets were full of Castro's and Rebel Army papers and documents; he would dictate anytime, anywhere, receive briefings whenever and wherever he could, and she operated what was, in effect, a portable office.

  Batista lost the "summer offensive," and close to one thousand dead and wounded plus the four hundred prisoners, which the rebels kept returning as they captured them. Castro took over five hundred modern weapons, including two tanks, an extraordinary contrast with the moment in June at La Plata when he had only his telescopic-sight rifle and Aguilera, a shotgun. It was calculated later that 321 men beat back the huge Batista offensive, and politicians and senior officers in Hava
na also calculated that the regime could not last much longer. Castro broadcast on Radio Rebelde to all of Cuba every detail of the victories; his ringing battle reports were read by Violeta Casal, the first woman announcer in the mountain.

  Late in June Raúl Castro kidnapped forty-nine American citizens in eastern Oriente in a desperate attempt to force the Batista air force to stop bombing his units in the "Second Front" and the peasant families spread throughout the Sierra Cristal war zone. Without consulting Fidel, who was fighting off enemy troops in the central Sierra Maestra, Raúl ordered the kidnappings when he obtained proof that Batista's planes were not only being refueled, but also loaded with bombs at Guantánamo; he had photographs of Cuban aircraft receiving ordnance at the U.S. naval base, and a rebel agent at the Cuban embassy in Washington had forwarded to the Sierra documents showing that three hundred rocket warheads had been delivered to the Batista command through Guantánamo. The Eisenhower administration's excuse three months after arms deliveries to Cuba were officially suspended was that the warheads were "replacements" for defective ones sent earlier; it was also explained that these replacements were done more easily in Guantánamo. In Washington nobody was thinking politically.

  Raúl's forces were being badly bruised by the intensive bombings, rocket attacks, and strafing at a time when they were also nearly out of ammunition. In a lengthy operational report on June 2, Raúl informed Fidel of "our lack of all kinds of ammunition . . . this offensive worries me." Vílma Espín, who had joined the "Second Front" in April, wrote later that "Raúl took the offensive with the Americans because we were lost; we didn't have anything to push them back with. Our bullets arrived in the middle of the offensive. When the Americans left, [the army] attacked again, but now Fidel's offensive was going into action in the Sierra, which kept the army from attacking on other fronts."

  It was on June 26 that Raúl's commandos raided the American-owned Moa and Nicaro nickel mines and the United Fruit Company's sugar mill at Guaro in the north of Oriente province, capturing twenty-five American managers and employees. Simultaneously, another commando on the south coast of the province took over a bus transporting twenty-four U.S. Marines back to Guantánamo. The rebels also commandeered tractors and trucks from the nickel mines "as strict war necessities." American consul general, Park Wollam, went from Santiago up to the Sierra to negotiate the release of the hostages with Raúl, and he was shown fragments of U.S.-manufactured bombs and the Guantánamo photographs. Earlier, the hostages were taken to see damage caused by the bombing and burn victims of napalm firebombing. Though Wollam and the other Americans were well treated and even given a Fourth of July party by the rebels, Raúl released the hostages only after Fidel ordered it in a broadcast from La Plata on July 3; even so, the last hostage was freed as late as July 18. During the entire time of the Americans' captivity, the "Second Front" was spared air attacks (presumably Washington suggested to Batista this would be a good idea) and Raúl was able to resupply and reorganize his guerrillas.

  As for Fidel, he used the kidnapping incident in a way that combined an assertion of his war leadership, pleased the United States, and affirmed support of his brother's actions. Though his broadcast came a full week after the kidnappings, Fidel said that his headquarters had received no reports on it because of the distance and because Raúl's forces had no radio transmitters, but such an occurrence was "possible . . . as a reaction to the recent delivery of three hundred rockets from the North American naval base at Caimanera [the Cuban name for Guantánamo] to Batista's planes, with which civilian populations are being bombed in the territory occupied by the rebels." Then he grandly announced that "despite all this, today I am publicly ordering [the hostages'] release . . . the order should be received and carried out, if it is true that these North Americans are being held by some revolutionary troops, because I believe that these North American citizens cannot be blamed for the shipment of bombs to Batista by the government of their country. I am certain that no rebel forces would make hostages of United States citizens so that they could observe the results of the inhuman bombings of Cuban civilians with weapons sent by the United States. . . . The 26th of July Movement is fighting for the respect of human rights. We believe that individual freedom is one of the inviolable rights of every human being and therefore no one sould be arrested without a just cause. We hope that the United States government will, in like manner, respect the lives and liberty of Cubans. . . . This is the necessary condition for the continuation of the present friendly relations between the two countries."

  Castro, behaving more and more like a statesman, handled the next incident with the United States, late in July, with equal diplomacy. As Batista had withdrawn army guards protecting the aqueduct from Cuban territory to the Guantánamo naval base (which depended completely on water from Cuba), U.S. Marines took over this responsibility, and the rebels protested it immediately as an act of American intervention. Rebel emissaries, including the journalist Carlos Franqui, entered into quiet negotiations with American diplomats in Santiago—reality increasingly forced American officials to deal with the Fidelistas—and rejected a proposal that the aqueduct area be regarded as a "neutral zone." Thereupon, Castro issued a formal declaration that "the presence of North American forces . . . is illegal and constitutes aggression against Cuban national territory," but "we are ready to give guarantees that the water supply will not be interfered with because our objective is not to attack that facility . . ." This message was both firm and conciliatory, and Castro's language carefully made the point that while he wished no disputes with the United States, he would make no concessions whenever, in his view, Cuban sovereignty was infringed by the Yanquís. This would remain his consistent policy toward the United States.

  Apart from the fact that Raúl did not consult Fidel over the kidnapping of the Americans, which he probably could have, given his practice of sending long operational reports to rebel headquarters, there is no question that he was emphasizing Marxist ideological indoctrination in his zone much more than his brother. It is also a fact that the Communist party's contacts with the rebels in the "Second Front" were much stronger than with Fidel's units. The rosters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, which Raúl organized into a modern army after 1959, demonstrate that the Marxist-Leninist hard core among the senior officers were the fighters of the "Second Front." Interestingly, while Fidel chose to deal with the Communists almost exclusively on a high policy level before and during the war years, Raúl concentrated on forging discreet but effective political and military links. This may have been a deliberate division of political labor between the brothers, aimed at protecting Fidel's democratic image before international public opinion, but the distinct ways in which their commands were run do suggest that Raúl took, or was given, the freedom to do what he pleased in this realm. A similar situation would develop later in Che Guevara's command in the final stages of the war. Even guerrilla dress differed: Raúl and Che wore black berets with a star for rank insignia; Fidel preferred his olive-green cap with no stars.

  Raúl's first Communist link in the Sierra Cristal was José "Pepé" Ramírez Cruz, a party leader in the sugar workers' union in the Havana area, who was ordered early in March to travel to Holguín in the north of Oriente, then to join the "Second Front" when it was established during April. Most likely, Fidel knew about Ramírez's assignment, but the point is that he was assigned to Raúl, not to him. In the mountains Raúl instructed Ramírez to organize the peasants politically in the "Second Front" region, in preparation for a "Peasant Congress," and Communist party officials were sent up to help in the task. An Agrarian Bureau was added to Raúl's army. After kidnapping the Americans late in June, Raúl dispatched Ramírez to Havana to inform the Communist party leadership. The congress was held in September, and Raúl addressed the four hundred delegates in terms Fidel was not using at that juncture: "Reactionaries, backed by foreign capital, maintain a tyrannical and bloody Batista regime because they can enrich themselves at the ex
pense of the people, even when this foreign backing means the strangling of our national economy." Since 1960, Pepe Ramírez has presided over the National Association of Small Farmers, a revolutionary organization in charge of cooperatives, and in 1986 he became an alternate member of the Politburo of the Castro Communist party.

  Jorge Risquet Valdés-Saldaña, in 1986 a full Politburo member, was another young Communist whom Raúl put in charge of the Department of Revolutionary Instruction and the José Martí School for Troop Instructors at Sierra Cristal village of Tumbasiete. This school became the model for postrevolutionary military indoctrination centers as it taught selected fighters "ideological formation" along with other aspects of education. At Tumbasiete, Communist instructors introduced for the first time a Cuban history text based on Marxist interpretations. By the end of 1958, all the Rebel Army instructors in Raúl's territory were Tumbasiete graduates, and the Marxist influence spread to the peasants in the well-populated regions of northern Oriente. Raúl likewise organized a Corps of Rebel Intelligence Officers (a forerunner of the army's G-2 intelligence service) and a Committee of Revolutionary Peasants as an "information" branch.