by Tad Szulc
By noon on Sunday, July 26, twenty exhausted rebels were back at El Siboney farmhouse, three of them wounded. Twenty more appeared by midafternoon, just as Fidel Castro was preparing to leave for the mountains to resume the war, this time as a guerrilla chief.
Within hours of reaching the farm, he announced that he was going to set up guerrilla operations in the Gran Piedra Sierra, a chain running diagonally to the sea northeast of Santiago. The Gran Piedra Mountains rose some ten miles from the city, and the highest peak, also called Gran Piedra, was over three thousand feet. Fidel asked for volunteers, and nineteen agreed to go—though one of them changed his mind within minutes of the march because his new shoes hurt. The next day, this nineteen-year-old boy, named Emilio Hernández, was captured and murdered by the army; the official announcement said he was killed fighting at Moncada.
Fidel's column included Jesús Montané; the Movement's treasurer, Oscar Alcalde; José Suárez and Israel Tápanes, who had fought at Gate 3; Juan Almeida, the black bricklayer's apprentice who began working at the age of eleven and would become one of the top guerrilla commanders; and young Reinaldo Benítez with a festering bullet wound in his leg. An old black woman in a shack above Siboney sent her grandson as a guide with the Castro group, and the next day they reached the village of Sevilla Arriba. Looking down at Santiago Bay at their feet, Fidel raised his arms, and in his best fighting style, proclaimed to his little band, "Compañeros, today it was our turn to lose, but we shall return."
Farther uphill, the men came across a hut, but the black peasant refused to sell Fidel the chickens he was raising there; this was one time when Castro's powers of persuasion failed. But the peasant led them to his brother's house a distance away, and the rebels feasted on a pig the man killed for them. Fidel, according to a published account, talked with him about the peasants' oppression by local landowners. Then he gave the man a nickel-plated pistol, saying, "When they come to bother you, open fire with this pistol . . . don't believe in anyone. Defend what is yours."
At another peasant's house, Fidel listened to a radio speech by General Batista giving his version of the events of July 26. The dictator had rushed back to Havana from his yacht and Varadero the afternoon of the Moncada attack, and had set up operational headquarters at Camp Columbia. His Council of Ministers declared a state of emergency in Cuba, and suspended a provision of the prison code under which wardens are held responsible for the lives of the prisoners.
This seemed intended to legalize a decision taken by Batista and General Francisco Tabernilla, the Army Chief of Staff, to murder Fidelista prisoners as they were being caught by the military in and around Santiago—even in hospital beds—and as far as Havana, where a handful succeeded in escaping. Over a period of four days starting on July 26, sixty-one men were thus assassinated, including Abel Santamaría and Boris Luis Santa Coloma, who at first were horribly tortured, the poet Raúl Gómez García, José Luis Tasende, who was a member of the military committee, and Dr. Muñoz. In seventy-two hours, Fidel lost some of his best friends. Only eight had died in combat, among them Gildo Fleitas whose wedding Castro had organized in Havana the month before. The final Fidelista death toll was sixty-nine, and only five wounded because, as Castro later pointed out, the regime wanted no surviving prisoners.
The army and the police suffered nineteen fatalities in the fighting and twenty-seven wounded. But the regime needed to make the outcome of Moncada loom as a great victory, so in his report to the Santiago Court of Justice, Colonel Chaviano (who had cowered under his desk at the command post during the battle) claimed that between four hundred and five hundred men, "equipped with the most modern instruments of war," had attemped to overthrow the regime. In tune with official propaganda, Chaviano reported that the attackers used knives "to open the abdomens of three patients" in the military hospital, and in firing on the troops they employed double-explosion (dum-dum) bullets in their automatic Remington rifles.
Batista as well as Chaviano charged that the attack was planned, organized, financed, and armed by antiregime groups exiled abroad, notably by former President Carlos Prío, overthrown in the March 1952 coup. Such a propaganda line served to justify the subsequent repression and declaration of martial law. It is also entirely possible that it had never occurred to the dictator that an uprising like Moncada could have been orchestrated so secretly by a young troublemaker from Havana University and a group of penniless followers. Listening to these accusations over the radio, Fidel Castro said, "They wedded us with a lie, and forced us to live with it."
In Santiago the army command sought to prevent newsmen from seeing too much of the barracks the afternoon of the attack, but a photographer succeeded in taking pictures of a number of Fidelistas tortured to death and still lying in hallways and passages. Marta Rojas, a young reporter for the weekly magazine Bohemia, hid the photographs in her brassiere as she flew to Havana that evening. The gruesome photos were published five days later, shocking the nation and unleashing a wave of sympathy for the rebels.
On July 28, as Fidel and his men were climbing the Gran Piedra Mountains, civic leaders were meeting in Santiago under the chairmanship of Archbishop Pérez Serantes (who twenty years earlier had prevailed on Fidel's father to have the boy baptized) to try to halt the executions. Word that rebel prisoners were being killed had spread in the city, and the group decided that the archbishop should persuade Colonel Chaviano to guarantee the life of any new prisoners. Both the archbishop and the colonel knew that Fidel Castro was at large in the mountains, and their agreement, as far as Monsignor Pérez Serantes was concerned, specifically assured that Castro would be taken and kept alive. Additionally, the archbishop published the next day a declaration, titled "Enough Blood!" outlining the new accord with the army.
As a result of the archbishop's statement, thirty-two Fidelistas came out of hiding to surrender to the authorities and were locked up at the Santiago jailhouse, where they were treated without undue violence. Before the intervention of the Roman Catholic Church, Haydée Santamaría and Melba Hernández had been moved from Moncada to the jail at dawn on July 28. During the trip in a jeep, a soldier burned Haydée's bare arm with the red-hot tip of his cigar. But later that week even Fidelista leaders who emerged from their hideouts, including Dr. Aguilera and Ernesto Tizol, were given full protection.
However, the rebels who were the most wanted, namely Fidel and Raúl Castro, were not surrendering. They had to be taken, and the archbishop was increasingly concerned about their fate. He did not entirely trust Colonel Chaviano and his officers, and he had already traveled to Manzanillo, a city near Bayamo, to escort personally a Fidelista prisoner captured there. On July 29, a Wednesday, Raúl Castro was arrested at a roadblock near the township of San Luis as he walked toward Birán and his parents' finca. He had fled by car from the Palace of Justice, but soon realized that he was safer on foot, and in two days and nights he covered the distance from the south to the north of Oriente province. The Rural Guard detained Raúl because he had no identity documents, and at the local police station, he insisted that his name was Ramón González. The lieutenant who interrogated him told Raúl he was lying and locked him up in the tiny jail.
The next morning, a traveling salesman came through San Luis, and the lieutenant summoned him to try to identify his prisoner. In the Oriente countryside, most people know each other, and the man said, "This is Raúl, the son of old Ángel, and the brother of Fidel Castro." Raúl was transferred to Santiago and Moncada the same afternoon, spending the night at the barracks, certain that he would be shot. But Colonel Chaviano was not looking for a confrontation with the Church, and Raúl was sent to the jail, which was rapidly filling with his companions.
For Fidel Castro, Wednesday and Thursday were bad days. His band was in awful shape. Reinaldo Benítez could hardly move because of his leg wound. Jesús Montané, who was flat-footed, dragged himself behind the others. The heat was suffocating, and they had no food. Fidel ordered a halt for the night in a cany
on on Thursday, when suddenly a shot rang out: One of the rebels had accidentally fired his rifle and the bullet went into his shoulder. On Friday, July 31, Fidel allowed the group to split up. Five men, including Montané and the two injured rebels, started back to Santiago and were arrested en route. But Castro and thirteen followers were determined to stay in the Sierra. In fact, Fidel developed the notion of returning to the coast and moving east to Sierra Maestra.
Archbishop Pérez Serantes, meanwhile, had become so preoccupied with the fate of Fidel Castro and other missing revolutionaries that he had taken to the road in a car to look for them; an elderly priest in a black cassock, a cross and chain around his neck, stopping every few hundred yards in the wet heat of the equatorial forest road to call out to the rebels must have been a strange sight.
On the evening of Friday, July 31, Fidel and his companions stopped at a hut on a hillside for an overnight rest. They had been moving south slowly toward the coast, but the journey was turning into an impossible undertaking. Five more rebels had abandoned Castro, leaving nine. They were almost entirely out of food. Behind the hut, they spotted a young peasant, crouching over a wood fire over which he was boiling a pot of rice. Without a word, the rebels slid behind the peasant, took his spoon away from him, and began to eat his rice.
"Do you have more food?" one of the men asked. The peasant said no, but he would guide them to the farm of his employer, two hours away. The farm was near the Siboney road, and Fidel recognized the owner as an old acquaintance and learned from him of the archbishop's efforts to locate him. He was also told of Chaviano's guarantees, and this convinced Fidel that only he and the two other Movement leaders—Oscar Alcalde and José Suárez—should attempt to cross over to the Sierra Maestra. The others, he said, should surrender. In the meantime, they returned to the hillside hut to spend the night.
At dawn on Saturday, August 1, a sixteen-man Rural Guard squad led by Lieutenant Pedro Manuel Sarría Tartabull came upon Castro and his sleeping companions and opened submachine gun fire on the hut. The army had been tipped off that Fidel was to be in the area, so Sarría was dispatched to look for him at the vast Mamprivá estate, which included the mountain farm. The gunfire flushed the rebels out, but Sarría cried, "Cease fire! . . . I want them alive!" One of the soldiers called Castro an "assassin" for killing soldiers at Moncada, but Fidel, with automatic rifles fixed on him and his eyes burning with rage, yelled back, "It is you who are assassins . . . it is you who kill unarmed prisoners . . . you are the soldiers of a tyrant!" A corporal shouted to Sarría, "Lieutenant, we'll kill them!" Sarría, a tall, black, fifty-three-year-old professional officer, raised his arm. "No," he roared, "don't kill them! I order you not to kill them! I am in command here. . . . You can't kill ideas. . . . You can't kill ideas!"
Eventually, the soldiers calmed down and proceeded to tie the hands of their prisoners. Fidel did not realize then that he and Sarría had met once at the university in Havana, and he insisted that his name was Rafael González. He was deeply tanned by the Sierra sun and hoped the lieutenant would believe him, especially because he had heard the official radio announce his death.
As Sarría's detachment escorted the Fidelistas to the road, Castro whispered to him, "Yes, I am who you think I am . . ." Then he asked, "Why didn't you kill me? You would have received a nice promotion, a promotion to captain . . .?" Sarría replied: "Muchacho, I am not that kind of man . . ." Fidel said, "But if you spare me, they will kill you." And the black lieutenant told him quietly, "Let them kill me. . . . It is one's ethics that must decide what one will do . . ."
Fidel Castro's life was spared as much by the fact that Rural Guard Lieutenant Luis Santiago Gamboa Alarcón was in bed with flu in the Moncada barracks the night of July 31–August 1 when Squad 11 was dispatched to look for the rebels in the hilly countryside above Siboney. Gamboa was a tough officer, wholly devoted to law and order as well as to the regime, and it is certain that he would have killed Castro without the slightest hesitation upon finding him, aware that Colonel Chaviano wanted the rebel chief dead—no matter what he had promised the archbishop. Later, during the Sierra war, Gamboa was promoted to captain after executing six peasants in Oriente whom he suspected of aiding the revolution. In January 1959 he was among the first Batista officers to be shot by a revolutionary firing squad after a quick trial. Gamboa's illness that night gave Lieutenant Sarría command of the squadron. On the day of the attack, Sarría had also intervened inside Moncada to prevent soldiers from executing two rebel fighters captured in the street. Many years later, he told an interviewer in Havana that he had spared Fidel's life not because he sympathized with him, but "because he was a human being . . . I love the profession of arms, but where I am in command, I believe that no crimes should be committed."
Sarría's courage included his determination to control his own soldiers at a psychologically risky moment when Fidel, Oscar Alcalde, and José Suárez were captured. All the Rural Guard troopers were black, as was Sarría, but the three prisoners were white. In the complex world of power relationships in Cuba, and especially in Oriente, black and mulatto soldiers tended to identify with Batista—himself a mulatto. To them, whites who were armed were automatically rebels and lawbreakers who should be killed. In their privileged military position, the soldiers did not experience racial discrimination, and Batista was their hero. Thus, when they flushed out the three white rebels, the soldiers' first cries were "They are white . . . they must be killed," and Lieutenant Sarría had to summon all his authority to halt what would have been, in effect, racial murders.
Moreover, Sarría was a Freemason, a fairly widespread affiliation in Cuba, and there was a bond among brothers in the supposedly secret lodges. On a hunch, Oscar Alcalde told the lieutenant he was a Freemason, wondering aloud whether Sarría might not be one, too. When Sarría nodded, Alcalde said, "From Freemason to Freemason, and because you have saved our lives, I will tell you where we have hidden our weapons—they are thirty feet from the hut, under bushes." Because Sarría needed to strengthen his authority over the troopers, the find of the arms cache—eight rifles and three pistols—made him look good before the soldiers. Alcalde had thought this would be the case.
As for Fidel, he was chastising himself for the "terrible error," as he said later, of having slept inside the hut. He knew that as a rule, military search parties never fail to go into huts, shacks, and houses, but it had been "so tempting to sleep under a roof because it had rained and the soil was wet." They were fatigued after living on fruit six days and nights in the mountains. Castro said that until his rude awakening "we slept and slept so deliciously." Thereafter, Castro recalled that during the nearly two years in Sierra Maestra, "even when rains came down in a deluge, we always slept in hammocks strung between trees, or rolled in a blanket on the ground."
As Sarría and his squad and the prisoners neared the Siboney road, firing broke out and the lieutenant ordered them to drop on the ground. Sarría's point men had spotted five rebels, including the black Juan Almeida, hiding in the tall grass off the road, and began shooting at them.
This time, the situation was saved by Archbishop Pérez Serantes. That Saturday, he had gone out again in his jeep to look for the rebels, leaving Santiago at 6:30 P.M. with a driver and two friends—but no military escort. A peasant they met on the road told them that a group of rebels had surrendered farther ahead, and the archbishop left the jeep to look for the men on foot. He reached the place where Almeida and the four others had been surrounded, just as the soldiers were about to shoot them. At a run, the monsignor lifted his cassock to jump over a fence and interposed himself between the rebels and the troopers, shouting, "Don't kill them . . . I have guarantees from the authorities!"
But the soldiers were furious over his intervention. They ordered him to leave, insulting him, and one trooper chanted, "I'm going to kill me a priest, I'm going to kill me a priest!" Devotion to the Church and its servants is rather superficial among poorer Cubans, and now Sarría had
to impose his authority to save the archbishop. The five new prisoners had their hands tied, and Fidel, Alcalde, and Súarez presently joined them. Sarría commandeered a flatbed truck to transport the prisoners to Santiago, placing Castro between the driver and himself in the cab. The archbishop, unaware of the events of the past hours, walked over to the lieutenant to warn him: "These prisoners are under my protection. I have given guarantees to them." The lieutenant replied: "Monsignor, you should tell it to Colonel Chaviano, not me." Fidel, who became concerned that word would spread of his surrender to the archbishop, broke in to say loudly, "I have nothing to do with the monsignor; I was captured, and it was you, Lieutenant, who captured me." Politically, Castro had to avoid the impression of surrender.
The army command in Santiago had been advised by telephone from the farm that Castro and seven companions had been seized, and presently Sarría's truck was stopped by truckloads of soldiers under the command of Major André Pérez Chaumont, the deputy to Colonel Chaviano. Pérez Chaumont, known in Oriente for vying for elegance with Chaviano and nicknamed "Beautiful Eyes," informed Sarría that "I came to take delivery of the prisoners." Sarría looked down at him, saying, "No, these are my prisoners; I'm taking them to Moncada." The major then proposed that Sarría keep all the others, if he delivered Castro to him. The two officers argued sharply for several minutes, Sarría being certain that Fidel would be killed if he turned him over to Pérez Chaumont. But when the archbishop pulled up in his jeep, the major gave up his efforts to pull rank.
Instead, he ordered the lieutenant to take the prisoners to the Santiago city jail rather than to Moncada to deprive him of the prestige among the military of having personally brought in Fidel Castro. This was fine with Sarría: At Moncada, Castro would have been in the hands of Chaviano, Pérez Chaumont, and Captain Manuel Lavastida, the Santiago chief of SIM, the Military Intelligence Service. It was SIM and its head, Colonel Manuel Ugalde Carillo, who had ordered and carried out the murders of the captured Fidelistas.