321 against 10,000
When Batista, on March 12, 1958, again suspended basic rights, the rebels issued a 22-page manifesto calling for a general strike early the following month. Castro was skeptical about its chances of success, as the rebels could count neither upon the Batista-controlled trade union federation (the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba) nor upon the Communists. He was right: the strike call was not widely heeded, especially in western Cuba. This brought such a loss of face that Batista thought he could turn the episode to his advantage. Inside the movement, however, the setback actually strengthened the position of Castro, who in a circular letter blamed it on poor organization by the lowland-dominated National Directorate. In a letter to Celia Sánchez, the fury that had been building up for months finally burst forth:
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 shit who can decide on nothing at all. With the excuse of opposing caudillism, each one attempts more and more to do what he feels like doing. I am not such a fool that I don’t realize this.… I will not give up my critical spirit and intuition which have helped me so much to understand situations before.73
Batista, sensing his chance, now mobilized more than 14 battalions or a total of 10,000 soldiers for a general offensive (codenamed Fin de Fidel, “End of Fidel”), which began on May 20, 1958. Three combat forces assailed the Sierra Maestra fortress, one landing on the coast to the south, the other two advancing from the north and north-west, with the support of heavy artillery, armored vehicles, helicopters, aircraft, and navy frigates. The objective was to surround and “exterminate” the enemy.
At this time, Castro had 321 men at his disposal,74 inadequately armed and especially short of ammunition. His brother Raúl had another 150 on the second front, but now he needed them himself. On the other hand, the guerrillas could draw “reinforcement” from the now-familiar mountains, forests, gorges, and valleys, in a Sierra Maestra that was still uncharted territory on the Cuban army’s maps.
The government troops were under the command of General Eulogio Cantillo and Fidel’s arch-enemy from Moncada days, General Alberto del Río Chaviano, the son-in-law of Batista’s chief of staff Francisco Tabernilla. The two generals, who had a deep aversion to each other, were later blamed for a number of serious mistakes. It even seems that Cantillo had a certain sympathy for the rebels – or at least one imagines so from Castro’s emotional letter to him in which he tried to drive a wedge deeper among the top ranks of the army. He wrote:
I realize that you are today the most prestigious and influential officer in the inner councils of the army, whose fate you can influence decisively for the good of the country, and it is to the country alone that the soldiers owe their allegiance. 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 that you, the army, and we can do for the benefit of Cuba, on which the eyes of all America are focused at this moment.75
The start of the offensive seemed to go well for the military. Troops pushed on through the foothills, while aircraft bombed what were suspected to be rebel positions. Only a few minor exchanges took place with the invisible enemy, who was trying to entice them into the forest. But the army’s numerical superiority allowed it to draw dangerously close to the key rebel positions.
The threat was especially acute in the River Plate area on the south coast, where the insurgents had overrun their first army post in January 1957, and where they had since located part of their infrastructure, including a secret landing strip. Castro’s own headquarters lay near the river’s source, sheltering in the proximity of the 2,000-meter Pico Turquino, the highest in the Sierra. From a captured plan of battle, the guerrilla leader knew that the military would concentrate its main strike force in this area – and he was becoming nervous. On June 19 he reported from headquarters to Guevara: “The situation at the beach is extraordinarily dangerous.… We’re running the risk of losing not only the territory but the hospital too, the radio station, the bullets, mines, food, etc. I have nothing but my rifle here to confront this new situation.”76 That day, June 19, 1958, marked the most critical phase for Castro. One month after the start of Batista’s big push, the rebels were running short of food and ammunition; they had only a few square miles still under their control.
Yet the Batista army, despite its superior numbers and its air support, does not appear to have grasped the reality on the ground. “For two hours the fucking planes have been at us,” he reported to Guevara. “The bombs they are dropping are napalm.”77 Numerous civilians fell victim to this hellish force, but in the end it was not capable of wiping out Castro’s units. Since he could not afford a pitched battle, he relied on flexible guerrilla tactics: his men drew the soldiers into ambushes, laid high-explosive mines, occupied narrow gaps, turned the jungle-clad sierra into a deadly trap for individual soldiers. By implanting the idea that they were lurking everywhere, the rebels sowed terror among the government forces (two-thirds of whom were raw recruits) and continually eroded their morale. Not only did the rebels’ real strength remain a mystery, but loyalty was crumbling in the ranks of the army. The ferment had been growing especially since the spring, when the US Congress had suspended military aid to Batista.
Soon there were signs that the tide had turned in Castro’s favor. On June 29, 1958, he gave the order for an all-out attack on a key position and gleefully predicted: “That will be the end of the offensive and of Batista.”78 The day before, on the Yara River near Santo Domingo, the rebels had ambushed and wiped out three companies of the 22nd Battalion. Castro described the battle as follows:
The 22nd Battalion … advanced in order toward the Sierra, but a powerful mine with more than 65 lbs of TNT exploded.… The first company was totally decimated by the rebel forces.… When Major Villavicencio ordered the retreat, Batista’s soldiers fled in complete disarray, abandoning large numbers of dead and wounded, as well as quantities of equipment, on the field of battle.… Lieutenant Colonel [Ángel] Sánchez Mosquera sent a new company.… But the rebels … prepared a new ambush, with a new TNT mine, which exploded in the middle of the advancing new company.79
Out of a total of nearly a thousand soldiers, only a third or so came out of it alive.
On July 28, 1958, in the Venezuelan capital Caracas, the eight major Cuban opposition parties and anti-Batista groups signed a “Manifesto of the Civil-Revolutionary Opposition Front” and proclaimed Fidel Castro sole leader of the revolution. The agreement, which was read out over Castro’s Radio Rebelde, called for “a broad civil–revolutionary coalition” to overthrow the “criminal dictatorship” and, following the establishment of a transition government, the reintroduction of “constitutional democratic norms.”
The signature of the Communist PSP was missing from the appeal, which had been composed by Castro and the head of Radio Rebelde, Carlos Franqui. But in late July, to avoid being left on the shelf, PSP leader Carlos Rafael Rodríguez – the Party’s most experienced politician, who had been part of Batista’s cabinet in the early 1940s – struggled off to the Sierra to eat humble pie. He stayed there until August 10, and it seemed that the PSP was willing to accept Castro’s claim to be supreme leader of the opposition to Batista. For a time after the victory of the revolution, Rodríguez would be one of the most important figures in Castro’s team – and he remained part of it until his death in December 1997. For, indeed, since the abortive general strike, it had been clear to Castro that he would not be able to build a new state with only amateurs, and that he needed reliable people with organizational experience who were prepared to work under tight discipline. This apparent readiness of Castro to work with the Communists on an ad hoc basis brought him closer to the positions of his brother and Che Guevara.
The top command of Batista’s task force never recovered from the crushing defeat of three battalions; the troops’ morale hit rock bottom, with thoughts
of escape uppermost in their minds. Thus, when bad weather further hindered military activity, the big push against Castro fell apart – as in a bad dream, the soldiers suddenly vanished. On August 20, 1958, Castro triumphantly broadcast over Radio Rebelde:
After 76 days of unceasing fighting on the First front of the Sierra Maestra, the Rebel Army has clearly repulsed and virtually destroyed the cream of the forces of the tyranny.… More than thirty clashes and six large-scale battles have taken place.… The rebel columns will advance in every direction toward the rest of the territory of the nation and nothing or no one will be able to stop them.80
It has been estimated that 1,000 of Batista’s soldiers were killed or seriously wounded in the fighting.81 The guerrillas put their own losses at just 27 dead and approximately 50 wounded. A total of 433 Batista troops were captured, along with large quantities of weapons and ammunition.82 There are no figures concerning the evidently high number of civilian casualties in Oriente Province.
While Castro and his men remained in the east and, together with Raúl and Almeida, continued harassing the government forces, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos took the war to the center of the island with a force of some 600 guerrillas. But although they won every skirmish with Batista’s army, they lost all their vehicles to air attacks or fuel shortages and had to travel hundreds of miles on foot, often across swamps or raging torrents. By the autumn, when they finally reached their goal in central Cuba, they were starving and their clothes were in tatters. First, they managed to cut the only west–east road from Havana to Santiago and to put the railway out of operation, spreading chaos and disintegration throughout the country. But the real turning-point came between December 29 and 31, 1958, when Che Guevara and 300 rebels besieged and finally took Santa Clara, a strategically important city with 150,000 inhabitants. During the action, they captured a whole garrison of 2,500 soldiers, who were thoroughly demoralized despite the 10 tanks at their disposal, and (by surrounding and threatening to blow it up) the last armored train, whose 19 wagons held 400 soldiers and a number of heavy weapons.
Military successes in mountainous terrain were not the only decisive element in the collapse of the regime. The island was also progressively shaken by an estimated 30,000 acts of sabotage83 against public companies and institutions in the cities, sugar-processing plants or large estates in the country, and key public or private-sector economic installations. State terror and corruption, bestial torture, and murder of political opponents as well as non-participants, meant that more and more people came to see the rebels as liberators. The agency with the greatest responsibility for the bloodshed was the SIM, the Military Intelligence Service set up with the help of the FBI, which, as the US consul in Santiago was aware, took “no prisoners.”84 Similar in style was the much-feared BRAC (Bureau for the Suppression of Communist Subversion), whose “father” was rumored to be former CIA boss Allen Dulles, brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.85 Anger at the activity of these repressive forces had been rising also among American liberal opinion and political circles, especially since the Congressional elections of 1956 had resulted in a Democratic Party majority and put pressure on the pro-Batista policies long pursued by conservative Republicans.
Cuba was more dependent than ever upon the United States. Between 1953 and 1958, direct US investment had increased by more than a third from 686 million to one billion dollars. Roughly 40 percent of Cuban sugar was produced in US-owned refineries; 90 percent of telephone and electricity services were controlled by US corporations; the island’s railways, oil industry, and nickel mines were in US hands, as were large parts of its banking system. The American Mafia ran gambling, prostitution, and whole sections of the tourist industry. The United States bought at subsidized prices 58 percent of Cuba’s annual sugar production, covering a third of its total requirement. Sugar represented 80 percent of all Cuban exports, but whereas two-thirds of that total went to the United States, three-quarters of all Cuban imports originated there. The sugarcane monoculture dictated by the mighty “sugar barons” and the US market meant that Cuba was forced to spend good money on grain, flour, and rice from its neighbor to the north – so much on rice, in fact, that it took a third of all US exports of the commodity.86 The American Way of Life, which 150,000 relatively well-paid Cuban employees of US firms were among the most conspicuous to enjoy, marked large parts of the country’s social landscape.
The CIA appears to have been the only institution which finally recognized, in late summer 1958, that the days of the Batista regime were numbered. In fact, not only did it try to keep an eye on the rebels, it also built up contacts with them at an early stage, for any future eventuality. The US vice-consul in Santiago, Robert D. Wiecha, was reputed to be the CIA’s link with the rebels in the mountains, who supplied them with important equipment so that contact could be made with them as and when it was necessary. But claims that as much as 50,000 dollars passed through Wiecha to Castro’s forces, or that weapons from Castro support groups in the United States were delivered to them via the CIA front company Interarms, have never been confirmed.87 Referring to credible sources, Tad Szulc concludes that the CIA organized arms flights to Raúl Castro’s second front.88 And Castro did indeed receive weapons from Cuban exiles in the United States who were well disposed towards him.
It has also been persistently claimed that the Mafia, through its leading member on the spot, Santos Trafficante, did the rebels many a favor in this respect; it had a lot to lose and thought well ahead. Although Castro at first announced: “We are not only disposed to deport the gangsters, but to shoot them,”89 after the victory of the revolution he bowed to pressure from the tourist industry and allowed them to continue operating for several months. But Trafficante was arrested in April 1959 and packed off to the United States in July, it being rumored that the time he had spent behind bars had been pleasant enough. The powerful Meyer Lansky did not remain that long: he followed his own instincts and headed off early in January.
As Castro had feared, the Cuban general staff worked with the United States to cheat him of victory at the last moment. Eisenhower’s people in Washington desperately tried to neutralize Castro and, when they finally gave up on the Batista regime, stumbled from one political dead-end to the next in their search for an alternative. Elections held under their pressure on November 3, 1958, proved to be a complete farce, as the opposition boycotted them and Batista’s cronies capped it all by crudely falsifying the results. The “victory” of a pro-Batista nonentity, Andrés Rivero Agüero, was lost from view amid the public ridicule. Nor did he ever manage to assume office, since the capture of Santa Clara by Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos had practically decided the outcome of the civil war. All around the country, the army was laying down arms; the leaders of the repression thought only of saving their skins and their money. Fidel and Raúl Castro, with a force now numbering 3,000 men, scarcely fired a shot in capturing a Santiago occupied by 5,000 of Batista’s troops. Nor did they meet any resistance on their way into Havana.
After the collapse of Batista’s offensive, Castro used secret contacts in an effort to win over vacillating officers as well as his former adversary in the Sierra Maestra, General Cantillo, whom he eventually met on December 28 in Oriente Province. The two men agreed that the armed forces would surrender unconditionally on December 31. But it turned out that the general was playing a double game. Having immediately taken Batista into his confidence, he shortly afterwards asked Castro for a week’s delay – with the aim of taking over himself and leaving Castro empty-handed.
On January 1, 1959, Batista signed his resignation statement, transferred command of the armed forces to General Cantillo, and handed over his presidential powers to the aged head of the Supreme Court, Carlos Manuel Piedra. Around two o’clock in the morning, he climbed aboard a waiting DC-4 together with 40 or so relatives and friends, wished “good health” to those for whom there was no room, and flew away to exile in the Dominican Republic. In the
course of the night, two more aircraft took off with Batista’s henchmen and their families.
So that he would not have to pinch and scrape, the dictator had meanwhile plundered the national currency reserves. Thus, when the first Cuban president of the National Bank, Felipe Pazos, gave his report five weeks later, it was revealed “that the previous regime had embezzled or appropriated 424 million of the gold and dollar reserves covering the Cuban peso.”90 Batista’s own “personal” fortune was then estimated as high as US$300 million, leaving the victorious rebels just 20 million that he had forgotten in his haste to take with him. Also left behind were mountains of documents that testified to the corruption and crimes of the Batista regime, so that the barbudos [that is, the “bearded men,” as they were popularly known] would have an easy job demonstrating the necessity and legitimacy of their revolution, as well as proving the guilt of thieves and murderers from the old regime, who were apprehended and brought before a revolutionary court. The documents also revealed the extent of cooperation between the United States government and Batista’s criminal regime.91
Castro celebrated the New Year in his headquarters at Palma Soriano near Santiago de Cuba, in the illustrious company of Celia Sánchez, PSP leader Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, the popular American actor Errol Flynn, and many of his close comrades in the rebel army. It was here that Castro learned over Radio Rebelde that Batista had fled and that Cantillo and Piedra had been installed as his successors. Castro was beside himself. “General Cantillo betrayed us,” he declared in a statement the next day. “All the positions and ranks conferred by the military junta … are null and void, and whoever accepts a position designated by the military junta will be guilty of treason, and it will be considered a sign of a counterrevolutionary attitude.”92 Over Radio Rebelde he called a general strike for January 2 and, as a precaution, declared Santiago de Cuba provisional capital of the country. Once it became clear that Cantillo had no authority, no power base and no support, the Americans desperately forced him to play the last card of releasing Colonel Barquín (the jailed leader of a naval mutiny at Cienfuegos) and positioning him at his side. Barquín, however, realizing that there was nothing more to be gained, went over to the other side and immediately had Cantillo arrested. Then he made contact with Castro and asked his nominee, Urrutia, to take over the functions of president and to form a government. On January 3 the 26th of July Movement finally assumed power.
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