Fidel Castro

by Volker Skierka

  The outside world thought they were long since dead, as the American UPI news agency had reported on December 4.52 The press and radio also quoted government sources to the effect that the invading force had been wiped out, and that Fidel and Raúl Castro had lost their lives.

  Some knew better, though – one of them being the dictator Batista. More and more often his soldiers were having to deal with the “dead men,” who would suddenly appear from the forest, launch an attack, and again melt away into the trees. Mountain farmers also knew that the guerrillas were there, for they helped them and were often pillaged, tortured or killed by the army for that reason. And members of the National Directorate of the 26th of July Movement knew from messengers that Castro was alive.

  Once he had moved into the mountains and established a supply link with Santiago de Cuba and Manzanillo, Castro arranged a meeting for February 16 with the core of the 11-person National Directorate, in the Los Chorros farmhouse on the northern side of the Sierra. Apart from the Castro brothers, Che Guevara, and Faustino Pérez, the other participants were the 21-year-old Frank País (head of the movement in Oriente), the 36-year-old Celia Sánchez from Manzanillo (who helped País coordinate resistance activity in Oriente), Haydée Santamaría (Castro’s comrade from the Moncada attack) and her new fiancé, founder member Armando Hart, and País’s close colleague, the 27-year-old Vilma Espín, a rum producer’s daughter with a chemistry degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Just as Celia Sánchez would now be Fidel’s closest friend and partner and live mainly with him in the Sierra from the end of 1957, so Vilma Espín moved up to become Raúl’s companion. After the revolution, she became his wife.

  The purpose of the meeting was to take the struggle out of the mountains into the towns and villages, and to formulate a countrywide strategy of underground resistance to the dictatorship. The outcome was Castro’s “First Manifesto from the Sierra Maestra,” dated February 20, 1957, which sympathizers of the 26th of July Movement soon began to distribute among the Cuban public. The tone was as exaggerated as it was confident of victory.

  Unable to defeat the Revolution with arms, the regime started spreading the most cowardly lie that our expeditionary force and I had been exterminated. After almost three months of sacrifice and effort, we can tell the country that the “exterminated” force smashed a siege of more than a thousand soldiers between Niquero and Pilón; … that the “exterminated” force, whose ranks were steadily reinforced by the peasants of the Sierra Maestra, bravely resisted the attacks of the air force and the mountain artillery; and it fought successfully almost every day against more than 3,000 men equipped with all kinds of modern weapons: bazookas, mortars, and several types of machine guns. Their desperate but powerless efforts have converted the Sierra Maestra into a hell, where falling bombs, the rattle of machine guns, and bursts of rifle fire are heard incessantly.53

  The manifesto summoned the whole country to civil disobedience and violent, paramilitary actions against the Batista regime – including, where necessary, assassination of “lackeys who torture and kill revolutionaries …, and all those who stand in the way of the Movement’s success.”54 Particular aims were to be the building of resistance organizations up and down the country and the raising of sufficient funds. Revolutionary groups in the towns and villages were to mount sabotage operations against state institutions and to destroy the country’s main source of income, sugarcane. To set a good example, Castro ensured that the first cane fields to go up in flames were those of his own family in Birán. His father did not have to witness it, however, as he had died there at the age of 80 on October 21, 1956, a few weeks before the Granma landing. From that time, the property was managed by Fidel’s elder brother, Ramón. According to their sister Juana, who in 1963 fled via Mexico to exile in the United States, the devastation of the family’s own plantations permanently damaged the relationship between Fidel and his mother.55

  Castro scored a major coup when the experienced war correspondent of the New York Times, Herbert L. Matthews, visited him in the Sierra Maestra and instantly placed his revolutionary struggle in the international limelight. After a difficult climb, during which he had to be continually on the alert for Batista’s soldiers, the 57-year-old journalist reached Castro’s headquarters on the morning of February 17, 1957. “He knew he needed publicity,” Matthews explained; “he always had a keen eye for that.”56 Celia Sánchez later recalled that, since “at that time there were only eighteen partisans in the Sierra Maestra,”57 they decided to put on a show for their guest. While the interview was taking place, Raúl Castro directed the little band as in a revolving-door farce, moving it noisily around to perform various activities on all sides. At one point, a messenger ran up bathed in sweat to deliver an important report from a “Second Column” that still existed only in the realm of the imagination.

  When the interview appeared on the front page of the New York Times on February 24, 1957, “with a photograph of Fidel holding his precious telescopic rifle, it created a tremendous sensation in Cuba and throughout Latin America. The story had come at the ebb tide of Fidel’s fortunes, and … made him a hero and symbol for the resistance.”58 At first, Batista’s defense minister flatly denied that the interview had taken place at all. But, Matthews notes, “my newspaper thereupon published a photograph of Fidel and myself together in the Sierra.”59 The accompanying article characterized Castro as follows: “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.”60 Castro’s adversary, Batista, admitted after his own flight from Cuba: “The interview … was of considerable propaganda value to the rebels. Castro was to begin his era as a legendary figure.”61

  The confirmation that Castro was alive did not cause rejoicing among all Batista’s opponents. Rivals felt under pressure to take some action to counter his fast-growing popularity, and in the course of 1957 many attempts were made to forestall and sideline the man supposedly stuck in his Sierra Maestra stronghold.

  On March 13 Castro’s ally from the Directorio Revolucionario, José Antonio Echeverría, seemed to show that the ends could just as well be served without a detour via Mexico and the mountains. With a little over 150 young men, far more than the number of fighters available to Castro at that time, he stormed into the presidential palace in Havana with the aim of killing Batista. He also occupied a radio station and personally announced that the dictator had been executed, but in reality Batista had been able to climb a short flight of steps to safety in the top part of the building. The crazy putsch attempt ended shortly afterwards in a hail of bullets, and Echeverría found his “hero’s death” on the pavement in front of the university steps. Altogether, 40 people were killed – not including the oppositionists and innocent people who were tortured and killed in the ensuing round up.

  Ex-President Prío, who had put up the funds for Granma, also wanted to block Castro’s path to power and organized a landing of his own. In late May the yacht Corinthia completed the crossing from Miami and reached the north coast of Oriente Province with 27 rebels on board, but four days later, on May 28, they were betrayed by a farmer and 23 of them were hunted down and shot without hesitation.

  Four months after that, on September 5, a revolt by liberal-minded naval officers from the Cuban aristocracy broke out in Cienfuegos, and air force Colonel Carlos Tabernilla, the son of Batista’s notorious chief of staff, had the city unceremoniously bombed. Hundreds of innocent people were killed. The operations were carried out by US-supplied B-26 bombers, even though the Cuban–American military cooperation pact expressly forbade their use in internal crises. The dictator’s troops then broke back into the city, torturing captured rebels and shooting 33 officers. Whereas top US generals acclaimed Batista as a “great president” and “outstanding soldier,” and bestowe
d a decoration of the US Legion of Merit on Colonel Tabernilla, liberal forces in the State Department were appalled at what had happened.62 They thought it better for Batista to be removed, so that the wind could be taken in good time out of Castro’s sails.

  On the very day when the Corinthia rebels were being mopped up, Castro further strengthened his own position by capturing El Uvero, a strategically important garrison of 57 soldiers on the edge of the Sierra Maestra. He used for the attack 80 of a force now numbering 127 men; six were killed in that dawn of May 28, 1957, two received life-threatening injuries, and seven more were wounded, while on the other side 14 soldiers were killed and 19 wounded. Che Guevara noted in his diary: “It was an assault by men who had advanced bare-chested against an enemy protected by very poor defences.… For us this was the victory that marked our coming of age. From this battle on, our morale grew tremendously; our decisiveness and our hopes for triumph increased also.”63

  Che, who had long been part of Castro’s leadership, proved himself as one of the most daring and canny fighters, despite the severe asthma that often forced his comrades to carry him through the mountains. Soon after the skirmish at El Uvero, Fidel Castro promoted his “field doctor” – with whom he had developed a brotherly relationship – to the rank of comandante, the highest in his guerrilla hierarchy. Until then there had been only one: Castro himself. “It made me feel the proudest man on earth that day,” wrote Guevara.64

  The guerrillas won the sympathy of the poor, and not only by paying whenever possible for the food they took or were given along the way. As they advanced into new land, they declared it a “liberated area” – liberating the rural population from the landowners and their bailiffs, and providing them with means of subsistence through, as it were, an advance land reform. They executed one notorious overseer who had murdered landless peasants and rebel sympathizers; and they distributed captured livestock to the campesinos, thereby also ensuring their own supplies. Batista’s army, by contrast, spread only fear and terror among the rural masses, wreaked only murder and destruction as they combed the land for the insurgents.

  Castro and his comrades showed no mercy, however, towards farmers who acted as spies for the Batista regime. In one case, which served as a warning to others, they were able to prove that a scout of theirs, Eutimio Guerra, had accepted 10,000 dollars from the army to lead the guerrillas into a deadly ambush and to murder Castro with his own hands. Castro sentenced him to death. “Precisely what happened next has remained a carefully guarded Cuban state secret for four decades,” wrote Guevara’s biographer, John Lee Anderson, in 1997.65 According to “Cuban sources,” Che Guevara personally killed Eutimio and, from then on, had a reputation for ruthlessly dealing with any breaches of revolutionary norms. In Guevara’s original diary, we read: “The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for [Eutimio], so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal. He gasped a little while and was dead.”66 Anderson shows that this version differs considerably from Che’s official report, and that these sentences do not appear in any of Guevara’s Selected Works published up to now.

  Castro’s skirmishes, his growing number of fighters and his territorial gains in the mountains could not obscure the fact that the movement was making no headway elsewhere in Cuba. In the view of the young and self-confident Frank País, whom Castro had made national coordinator of its operations, the 26th of July Movement suffered from a “caudillo problem.”67 Castro was seen as crude and intemperate, and people were especially afraid of his outbursts of rage against such close comrades as Celia Sánchez; the only one spared them seemed to be Che Guevara. País complained to Raúl Chibás, brother of the founder of the Orthodox Party, that Castro took decisions without regard for the directorate of the Movement; and that, with his “All weapons for the Sierra!” position, he attached too little importance to the fighters in the lowlands, who, at great risk to themselves, were conducting countrywide operations to destabilize the regime as well as organizing the chain of supplies to the mountains.68

  In a series of spirited letters to Castro, País tried to convince him that it was necessary to have a number of bourgeois-liberal reformist politicians on his general staff: “You must have heard the tendentious statements that attempt to portray you as an ambitious man, surrounded by immature boys … but without … support from serious and responsible elements.… In a revolution one cannot always hold meetings, nor can everything be centralized in one person.”69 País did emphasize that Castro would naturally have the final say, but the challenge to his authority was clear, and it was only with difficulty that Castro held back his anger. He wrote to País:

  I’m very happy, and I congratulate you, that you so clearly saw the necessity of formulating plans on a national and systematic scale. We’ll keep fighting here as long as it is necessary. And we’ll finish this battle with either the death or triumph of the real Revolution.… What is referred to as our little world, the Sierra, … is really our big world.… Your letters speak for themselves.70

  Tactician that he was, however, Castro followed some of País’s advice in a further “Sierra Maestra manifesto.” This promised free elections, on the basis of the 1940 Constitution, after a period of transition from the Batista dictatorship; social and economic reforms; an agrarian reform, with appropriate compensation for big landowners; and a mass literacy campaign. It also warned other countries against intervention in Cuba.

  When it was published in Bohemia on July 28, 1957, the manifesto had precisely the desired effect and won Castro the broader support for which País had been looking. But País was no longer able to rejoice at the success of the initiative: on July 30, just two days after its publication, he and another comrade fell into the hands of Santiago police chief José María Salas and a particularly notorious policeman, the “Black Hand,” who killed them with a bullet in the base of the skull. Apparently, a tapped telephone conversation with Vilma Espín had set them on his trail. País’s death provoked huge protests and a three-day general strike in Santiago. Remarkably, however, the man whom local cadres appointed to succeed him was not Castro’s choice, Faustino Pérez, but País’s own close collaborator René Ramos Latour, who would himself fall in battle exactly a year after País’s death.

  Representatives of seven Cuban opposition groups (including the Auténticos, the FEU, and the Directorio Revolucionario), which all seem to have received financial support from ex-President Prío, took the July manifesto as the occasion for a meeting in October 1957 in Miami. Two people from Castro’s 26th of July Movement were also there – without his authorization. The meeting resulted in the adoption of the so-called Miami Pact, published in the US press on November 1, which envisaged the formation of a Junta de Liberación Cubana (Cuban Liberation Council) and a request for recognition by the United States.

  In the Sierra Maestra, the pact was immediately seen as part of the intrigues of old power groups and freeriders, through which Prío in particular, already linked to the CIA, sought to advance himself as an alternative to Castro. After nearly six weeks of silence, Castro’s eventual refusal to support the pact ensured that it would never be more than a scrap of paper. What incensed him most was that it did not even categorically reject the prospect of a military junta for Cuba. And he regarded as a provocation the idea that, after the fall of Batista, his rebel army should integrate into the regular (that is, “Batistan”) armed forces. “The leadership of the struggle against tyranny,” he wrote, “is and will continue to be in Cuba and in the hands of the revolutionary fighters.… The exiles must cooperate in this struggle.… If our conditions are rejected, … we will continue the struggle alone, as we have up to now.”71 One of these conditions was that his candidate for provisional president of the Republic should be accepted. He had already chosen the respected judge Manuel Urrutia Lleó for that post, a man who had shown great civil courage at a trial of eight rebels in May 1957, when he
had (unsuccessfully) opposed their imprisonment for eight years, on the grounds that they were “models of dignity and patriotism.”

  The next attempt to involve Castro in a political alliance and to end the civil war came on March 1, 1958, from the bishops of the Catholic Church, under Cardinal Arteaga, who proposed the establishment of a “commission of reconciliation” and a government of national unity. But the majority could not bring themselves actually to demand the resignation of Batista as a prerequisite for such a peaceful compromise. This gave Castro the opportunity to reject this initially popular initiative, with the argument that the Church was placing itself on the dictator’s side.

  At the beginning of 1958, after numerous battles and skirmishes in eastern Cuba, the rebels controlled nearly 2,000 square miles of territory72 and were constantly expanding their radius of operations, although they still had fewer than 300 men under arms. Raúl Castro, now also a comandante along with Juan Almeida and Camilo Cienfuegos, opened a second front in March in the Sierra del Cristal and Sierra Nipe, to the east and north of the Sierra Maestra, more or less encircling the brothers’ parental home. Meanwhile the rebels did what they could to put together an infrastructure in the “liberated territory.” On Che Guevara’s instructions, they built hospitals, clinics and schools and brought out a hectographed newspaper; they created workshops, a small cigar factory and even an ammunition factory, as well as a training center for new recruits. From February 24, 1958, the Radio Rebelde transmitter broadcast pro-Castro propaganda and announcements, under the direction of the journalist Carlos Franqui. The confiscation of 10,000 cattle and other livestock from big landowners, and their distribution mostly to peasants without any property, ensured provisions for both the local population and the rebel forces. The lawyer Humberto Sorí-Marín drew up the legal basis for these actions in October 1958, in the shape of a revolutionary agrarian reform.