by Jay Cantor
The boat was too small, but we had to use it, we couldn’t wait to purchase another one. Fidel had spoken. Fidel had spoken in radio broadcasts, in newspaper interviews, in clandestine leaflets distributed throughout Cuba, THIS YEAR WE WILL BE FREE MEN OR MARTYRS! I heard Pino, the fat captain, tell Fidel that the clutch needed fixing. “No time,” Fidel said. Pino took off his cap and ran his hand through his unwashed black hair. He was shirtless, and his large breasts hung down. There was a north wind blowing, he said imploringly. Soon small-craft warnings would be posted. (And ours was certainly a small craft, a too-small craft.) With his right forefinger, Castro tapped the end of his brown mustache, miming thought—for the matter had already been decided. He pointed the forefinger outward, the barrel of a gun aimed at the captain’s large hairy chest. “We leave today,” he said.
For we have to make good on his speeches, interviews, leaflets, his promise. And men will be waiting at Niquero on the thirtieth with trucks and supplies for us. The troops must be there for that meeting; it is crucial to his plan. We are to take Niquero and advance towards Manzanillo. At the time of the landing, the city network, under Frank Pais, will rise in Santiago. Then a vaguely defined but overwhelming apocalypse has been revealed to Fidel, of sabotage, agitation, and general strike. (Pais met with the leadership in Mexico City to dispute this vision. His skin was sallow and hung in folds near his neck, as if his diet were irregular, his weight constantly changing drastically. The time was wrong, he said. His networks weren’t ready. Castro tapped the end of his mustache. Pais was overruled.) So we must go through uncertain weather, on a small boat with a bad clutch, to a fortified coast that has been notified—by our leader—of our arrival. To show our good faith, Fidel said, to show that Fidel Castro and the Movement of the Twenty-Sixth of July can be trusted by the people. This year, he has said, we will be free men or martyrs. This year: we have one month left. We must make good on his dare.
Caceres, who had trained with us, came down to the dock to make a last appeal to Castro that he be included in the expedition. No, Castro said, Guevara is enough. The force mustn’t be internationalized. It must appear a Cuban national movement. Caceres helped us load the long white wooden crates of arms, and the heavy black boxes of ammunition and medical supplies. Fidel had done all right on the weapons: two anti-tank guns, fifty-five Mendoza rifles, three Thompson machine guns, forty light hand machine pistols. Caceres stumbled on the uneven wood of the gangplank, and a crate containing the oil-covered parts of a machine gun slammed into my stomach. I bellowed in pain, a wordless sound. Ricardo, standing behind me with an ammunition box, laughed. “Che never curses,” he said to the men behind him. “What strong will! He should have been a priest.” No, I thought to myself, a nun. I caught my breath, and looked up at Caceres, his face abashed and sad—for he was both clumsy and unchosen. The sunlight poured down behind him into the harbor. Then I looked at our small white boat, surprised by the sight of it, as if a piece of doll’s furniture had been put in a sitting room. I wondered how many of these weapons would ever be fired? For it was like Castro to be careful about many details—the training under General Bayo, a veteran of Spain, had been excellent—and then to overlook one matter, and that one the essential.
After the loading, Caceres embraced me, and I returned his hug, pressing his head into my chest. But my thoughts were elsewhere, on the storm to come, the small-craft warnings, the small craft. Caceres had looked gloomy throughout the work, disappointed by Fidel’s refusal. But his step as he walked away from us had a buoyancy, and I saw him look over his shoulder at the boat and smile.
Three other Cubans who had trained with us gave one last look at the ship and walked away after Caceres, unwilling to risk any more on such a mad plan.
11/27/56: Since the time Nico spoke to me on the dock yesterday I don’t think he’s said another word to anyone. This morning was calm and bright: a good omen, we thought, for the weather reports had been wrong, and Fidel had—magically—been right. Nico walked to the bow carrying a bucket of seawater with careful, slow steps, as if there might be a shortage soon. He sat cross-legged, facing the ocean, with the bucket beside him. Methodically he soaped his face and head till he produced a thick white lather. It looked like a curly judge’s wig. Nine men stood around him in a half-circle, watching, but he took no notice. He had moved away from us, behind that invisible barrier that makes it impossible to warn the prince of the traitorous plots, the poisoned swords. He shaved his cheeks, and with long slow strokes of his straight razor he shaved off his now-curly hair. He carefully washed the razor off in the bucket after each stroke. A wind came up and swayed the prow. A small red line opened on the right side of Nico’s scalp, and grew in size, a flood pouring through a town. “You’ve cut yourself,” Marcos said in a thick voice, as if out of a daze, hypnotized by the decided motions of Nico’s long gleaming silver blade. Marcos took one of his dozen white handkerchiefs from his pants pocket, and held it towards Nico. Nico ignored it. The seawater, I thought, must have stung in the cut, but Nico didn’t show it on his face. The cut will scar up from the salt, like his other “battle” wounds. I stared. Light gleamed from his large expanse of scalp, blue pink black brown in the sun, a streak of red that was welling and widening; the colors blended and shimmered like the rainbow formed by oil on water. “An ornament for the prow,” Marcos said, the spell broken. He tucked his handkerchief away in his pocket; he had them hidden all over his clothing.
Nico’s little ritual struck me with the force of a poem, an immediately apprehensible yet surprising gesture added to the lexicon. He meant that he was ready to die.
11/30/56: The wind that cut Nico’s scalp grew in density and ferocity. The good omen was proved false, the storms began, and I lost my stomach for the enterprise. The first men started coming to me in my capacity as medical officer. But I couldn’t find the box with the antihistamine tablets. Fidel gathered on the deck those of us who could still stand up, and we sang the Cuban national anthem. He had constructed a compelling image for himself: his men defying the storm, roaring back at the waves. But by the second verse the rain began, hard whipping cords; suddenly our clothes were as wet as if we’d dived into the ocean. High waves lifted over the prow. The sea turned black. Faces began to twist and melt. Men vomited over the sides, clinging to the chrome railings, or threw up on the deck, the wind spraying their vomit into their faces. Someone shouted that there was a leak below, that water was flooding in.
As we bailed the ship, the big metal buckets going from hand to hand, I held the pail for a moment and threw up in it. So had many of the men around me. I received a bucket filled with seawater, other men’s vomit, bits of cracker, sausage, and green bile; I added my own. There were twenty of us working in uneven lines, on a deck eight feet wide, bringing the water up from below. Pino’s orders contradicted Roque’s, his second in command; Roque’s orders were askew of Almeida’s, our group’s officer. It was impossible to see an arm’s length through the sheets of rain. The sun had gone out. The lines never got straight. The pails moved about frantically in the dark. “That’s my own puke again,” I heard someone behind me say. “I recognize it.” The buckets were just being passed around without being dumped. Water crashed over the deck in huge fists, a man slammed into me, and I fell backward onto someone’s chest. The metal pail was knocked from someone’s hands and hit the side of Almeida’s small head. He shouted for me to help him. But I couldn’t get out from under the body lying across me. My arms felt weak. Slop from one of the buckets splashed over my cheek. I turned my face to keep from choking on my own vomit and sputum, and threw up the little food bits I had left onto Almeida’s jacket. I prayed as I threw up, as generations have before me, “O Lord take me now!” Ricardo, groaning somewhere to my left, added responsively, “If only it comes now! If only it comes now!” We sounded like acolytes.
But it didn’t come then. It will come too late; on land. If we ever find land. The boat is too small for the waves. At high speeds
the clutch slips; in the storm accurate steering was impossible. We have gone days off course. And Roque, a man as fat as the captain, panicked. The boat was overloaded, he said, too heavy. That was why it was taking water. He had the men toss many of the heavy automatic weapons overboard.
During the last moments of the storm, after the rain had stopped, the air turned heavy around me. I writhed with an attack, my legs stuck straight out, rigid with pain. The other men, my comrades, were terrified by the spectacle and drew away from me. Only Ricardo came near the odd fish flapping on the wet deck, near the bow. “Do you want a shot?” he asked. I had trained him and the others in first-aid techniques, shown them on my own arm how to give injections. But I shook my head no this time. “I can do it with my good hand,” he said, as if I had refused him because I feared his clumsiness. I couldn’t explain then that I didn’t want to start using up the epinephrine yet, that this attack was bad, but that things might get much worse. Ricardo squatted down next to me anyway, not touching me, but watching. He looked curious, not particularly sympathetic. He stroked his thin lips with his thumb meditatively, a thoughtful pathologist. The mild pink flesh of his lips grew bulbous, breathed in and out. Ricardo watched. This was what he had come down from the mountains to the courthouse for: new sights, strange spectacles, and revenge. I think he really does despise humanity.
The attack means I won’t be much of a combatant for a while, so I exchanged my new semi-automatic weapon (given to me because I was the best of Bayo’s students, the best marksman; I could make things hop) for Ricardo’s old bolt-action rifle. Because of Roque’s panic there will be a shortage of automatic weapons. He was wrong, too. It wasn’t the weight. The water had come from a broken pipe in the toilet. The desperate bailing and the jettisoning had been unnecessary. But the weapons are gone now.
Today the sea settled itself after its attack. But my stomach feels the same, I can’t tell the difference between my nausea and my constant fear. Bayo said that terror would be one’s companion throughout the war. The most dangerous thing a guerrilla can do, he said, is to let the fear lead him, let it make him fight at the wrong time, let his fear be a dare to him, a challenge to his manhood. (This year we will be free men or martyrs!) The first rule of guerrillas: don’t attack unless you’re certain of victory. Guerrillas can’t afford to lose a battle. The army can; it has many men to spend. The first lesson: learn to run away. Manhood, Bayo said, is for the rich. (But across the chessboard his mistakes came from his inability to refuse an offered pawn. His large hands, with their old veins, would hesitate for a moment, then take the fatal gambit.)
It was Bayo, square-faced, dispassionate gentleman, who convinced me that victory over Batista was truly possible. (But then what had I thought before? What did I think I was doing when I joined Castro?)
We lived in ten separate apartments scattered over Mexico City, as protection against police raids. Bayo had gone from apartment to apartment, giving us theoretical instruction, and teaching us how to clean and reassemble our weapons. A stocky fastidious exacting teacher. Then he had found a ranch for us, six miles long, ten miles wide, covered in part with jungle. There we followed an improvised series of exercises that Bayo’s deep slow authoritative voice made sound magical, certain of success. We learned to shoot pistols, rifles, machine guns; how to make bombs and destroy tanks; how to spot aircraft, and where on the fuselage to aim; how to march through jungle without being seen—forced marches with full pack, running till we could not go on running, crawling, lying still, five ten fifteen hours a day. He would not relent on his regimen until we knew how much pain we could stand, until we collapsed, dizzy from the strain and the grandness of our mission. He lectured on strategy in guerrilla warfare, how to harass an enemy, bewilder him, attacking with a circle maneuver and stepping away, then leading the army into the next group, a tactic called “the minuet.”
Guerrilla warfare, Fidel had said, in a voice of mild, distant consideration, would never succeed in Cuba. The honor of the Cuban people would be revolted by it. But Bayo had convinced him that no other method was possible for such a small force, that honor, too, was for the rich. (Fidel’s objection was strategic: that “Cubans” would be revolted by it, not that he was.) And Fidel’s gifts as a leader had so impressed Bayo that he had wanted to join us. I had thought that if Fidel could convince such a strong-willed realistic man … but that was before I saw the boat.
And Bayo had not been impressed with Fidel at first. They had met in a bar in Mexico City. Bayo, a Cuban but a veteran of the Spanish Foreign Legion and the Spanish Civil War, had been an instructor at the military academy in Guadalajara. Soto, knowing of Fidel’s need, had found him and arranged the meeting. Fidel had spoken at length of the Mocncada attack. Bayo asked how the men had been prepared for their roles. Not at all, Fidel said smiling. Bayo had pursed his lips, but said nothing. What, Fidel asked, did Bayo do now? He ran a furniture factory. Did he like it? No, it was not to his taste. Would he be interested in something closer to his old line of work? Bayo, judiciously, said that that would depend. So Fidel explained—at length—the dimensions of his revolution to liberate the oppressed. Bayo said he would be interested—at a salary of eight thousand dollars. But wouldn’t he be interested, Fidel asked, in a glorious expedition to free the fatherland from the yoke of an ape’s dictatorship? No, Bayo said. He had been born in Cuba in 1892, when it was still Spanish. He was not a young man. His parents had left for Spain when he was six. He had no memories of Cuba. He would be interested for six thousand dollars. Would he be interested, Fidel wondered, for two thousand?
“You’ve always been a gangster, you dumb stupid bastard. Your plan stinks. Your idea is impossible. I’ve had a thousand conversations with young fools. They have a few drinks and dream of overthrowing Franco, Somoza, Trujillo, Perez Jimenez, Peron, Carias, Odria, Stroessner, Rojas Pinilla, and our own—your own, I mean—Batista. But their words are like our cigar smoke.” His large hands rose, miming smoke. “I’d be interested,” he said, “for four thousand dollars.”
“I’m not drunk,” Fidel said, tapping his mustache. “It’s a deal. Will you take it in monthly installments?”
That was equitable.
And after such doubts, Bayo, at the end, had wanted to join Fidel! My stomach ached. And I realized, as I looked over the bow, that I had heard the story of Bayo’s negotiations only from Fidel, heard it only after Bayo offered to join us (and had he? I had heard that only from Fidel, too).
I have Bayo’s rules in my new notebook (where, I wonder now, did I leave my old notebook, my old life? and why?). The pages are filled with diagrams of tactics, the ink already dissolving from the seawater that has washed over our small bow. I am chief of staff (for I was Bayo’s best student) as well as medical officer.—What vanity! Pride, nausea, and fear: my companions till the end. The old man outside Obrajes was right: I am a nervous ambitious man.
The radio receives, but doesn’t transmit anymore. No one knows how to fix it. Today, as ordered, Pais began the rising he did not want in Santiago. Courageously, loyally, he had followed Fidel’s instructions. A few men clustered below deck, near the set, and passed its words back to us, and above, where I stood looking at the sullen ocean. The customs house has been set on fire. Political prisoners have been freed from Boniato jail. Dozens of policemen and soldiers have been killed. Batista has suspended civil rights throughout the province.
Everyone, Fidel said, after assembling us on deck, should be cheered by the news. The 26th of July has many followers capable of striking blows at the dictator, willing to make the supreme sacrifice for the Movement. But I think we all felt (though would not say, for we are tender of each other’s morale, and to see the extent of one’s own fear on another’s face might be devastating) that it was only another big mess. The actions don’t coordinate with our arrival, because we haven’t arrived. We’re still at least a day from the coast. And we were meant to land at Niquero, where trucks and supplies wait for us. But Pino
says he can’t find Niquero.
12/1/56: Each day brings new disasters, comic calamities, farcical presentiments of doom. The only omens anyone trusts anymore are bad ones. Last night we headed in for the coast, looking for the Cabo Cruz light. We must make land soon, for we’re about to run out of food, fuel, and water. All night long the boat went back and forth along the coast, searching for the light. A wind sprang up, buffeting the ship. No stars were out. Roque climbed to the top of the bridge tower to get a better view of the coast. The tower slanted beneath him, he tripped and fell overboard. Ricardo, standing with me by the rail, turned his back to the sea. “Let the son of a bitch die,” he said. “The boat is too heavy. And he’s too fat. We can spare that shithead better than the machine guns he cost us.”
Towards morning we found Roque, barely conscious, but still alive. He’s lost some weight; but we’ve lost another day.
Castro seems to me now like a badly coordinated careless giant. He is something more than merely ambitious, and he is never anxious. If I close my eyes this evening I see him towering over us, somewhere off the bow of an absurdly small white boat. He looks a god of the sea, huge, powerful, charismatic, smiling at something we cannot see off in the distance. He is as heedless and unworried as a child, and as unknowing of what he does. He tosses us about, hardly noticing what happens to the tiny figures; he flings us here and there like toys, knocks us over, throws a few more of us into the air.
12/2/56: We’ve run aground. A salt-marsh swamp, Pino says, near a place called Belie. At least he hopes it’s near Belie. He hopes it’s near shore. There’s no moon, and it’s impossible to see ahead through the tangle of vines and mangrove branches. They are like cross-hatchings that lead to deeper shades of darkness.