by Tad Szulc
On May 3 the congress approved the amnesty bill, and Batista signed it on May 6, "in honor of Mother's Day." On Sunday, May 15, 1955, exactly at noon, Fidel Castro and all his companions were freed from the Isle of Pines prison—less than two years after the assault on Moncada. And he came out swinging and fighting. A now famous photograph shows him with his right arm raised in a salute as he walked out of the prison's administration building with Raúl, Juan Almeida, and Armando Mestre, followed by the others. He wore his old gray wool suit (he had sent the dark-blue suit of the trial back home) with an open-collared white shirt; he had written Lidia earlier not to waste money on a new guayabera and slacks. From the prison, Fidel was driven to the home of his companion Jesús Montané, and then to the Isle of Pines Hotel in Nueva Gerona to hold his first press conference and sign autographs; as he had so often emphasized, propaganda must not stop even for a moment.
In the evening the ex-prisoners boarded the steamer El Pinero for the crossing to the fishing port of Batabanó on the mainland. Their friends on the island shouted farewells as the vessel left, and some three hundred supporters greeted them on arrival at five o'clock in the morning on Monday. The crossing was the first opportunity Fidel had in fifteen months to see his prison companions, and they used these first hours together to plan the launching of the 26th of July Movement as a revolutionary organization of the masses. But Castro also found time to draft the "Manifesto of the People of Cuba from Fidel Castro and the Combatants," declaring that their war was just beginning:
"As we leave the prison . . . we proclaim that we shall struggle for [our] ideas even at the price of our existence. . . . Our freedom shall not be feast or rest, but battle and duty for a nation without despotism or misery. . . . There is a new faith, a new awakening in the national conscience. To try to drown it, will provoke an unprecedented catastrophe. . . . Despots vanish, peoples remain . . ."
The document was published in the Havana mass-circulation daily La Calle on the morning the Isle of Pines prisoners arrived at the capital's railroad station from Batabanó. When the train entered the station, a crowd broke into the national anthem, and Castro was carried on the shoulders of his admirers to the street. Now Fidel wore a white guayabera and gray slacks, and he carried a large Cuban flag that was handed him on arrival. Speaking to journalists, Castro announced that he would remain in the country, and not become an exile, in order to be active politically in the Ortodoxo party. This was part of his short-term strategy: The Ortodoxos were well organized and well disposed toward him (the Moncada rebels were mainly recruited from among young Ortodoxo militants), and they provided a natural base for the creation of the 26th of July Movement. Nor did Castro wish to antagonize the army as he returned to the political scene; he said that "I am not an enemy of the army, simply an adversary," and went out of his way to praise the army officer in charge of security at the island prison (whom he warmly embraced as he left the penitentiary).
Castro's blueprint for the new Movement included other young anti-Batista activists, and he wasted no time contacting those who were released from Havana prisons under the terms of the general amnesty. Among these men, Castro found two recruits who would play key roles very soon: Armando Hart Dávalos, a lawyer, and Faustino Pérez Hernández, a physician. Naturally, his sister Lidia (with whom he went to stay in Havana), Melba, and Haydée were among the first people Fidel greeted and embraced. So was Naty Revuelta, the only person in Havana who knew beforehand that Fidel was on the verge of assaulting Moncada. Raúl Castro, who rented a room downtown with Pedro Miret, traveled to Birán late in May to see his parents and spend a week with them. Fidel was too busy with conspiracy to go to Oriente.
Though Castro declared on his return from prison that he would devote himself to Ortodoxo party politics, he knew that Batista would not tolerate his type of opposition, and that armed struggle would be the only alternative. He said so to his followers, and they immediately began organizing the 26th of July Movement clandestinely (Fidel first proposed this name when they were aboard the steamer from the Isle of Pines). At the same time, Castro embarked on a public campaign that could not fail to make him intolerable to Batista; he believed in self-fulfilling prophecies. He said he and his associates would serve as "guinea pigs" to test Batista's promise of constitutional guarantees for the opposition, adding that "I shall be the first victim of cowardice if there are no such guarantees" and that "I have been informed that acts of aggression are being prepared against me and my companions."
Meanwhile, violence once more exploded in Havana, with assassinations, bomb bursts, fires, and beatings. Students fought the Batista police, and the authorities responded in kind. Castro jumped into the fray with articles in La Calle and Bohemia denouncing the regime, and with fiery radio broadsides. When Pedro Miret was arrested on vague charges, Fidel issued a statement charging that "amnesty is a bloody hoax," and rushed to court to defend him. The regime banned Castro from the radio, and so he raised the drumbeat of his accusations in the press. At every opportunity, Fidel reminded Cubans of the massacre of his men on July 26, and when Colonel Chaviano, the Moncada commander, published his own version of events ("we did our duty"), Castro lashed back with a savage Bohemia article under the headline CHAVIANO, YOU LIE! Then, trying to divide the military, in another article he paid tribute to army officers, whose conduct he described as gallant.
Making his home with Lidia, who fed him and washed his only guayabera shirt every day, Fidel was in perpetual motion, in a paroxysm of revolutionary activity, as if to make up for the twenty-two months behind prison bars. He delivered speeches, wrote articles, and held meetings with his followers to give shape to the nascent 26th of July Movement. Armando Hart and Faustino Pérez, who had belonged to the short-lived moderate National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), now became the channel for recruiting MNR activists for the 26th of July Movement. One evening, several friends listened to Fidel's account of the battle of Moncada—and to his conclusion that "now I have enough experience; with new resources, we shall not fail the next time."
Castro was increasingly concerned about his safety as he went on defying Batista. Starting in the first days of June, his brother Raúl, Ñico López (who had just returned from exile in Mexico), and Jesús Montané moved into Lidia's apartment with their weapons to protect him. After a week or so, however, Fidel decided that he should not sleep two nights in a row in the same place, so he kept moving among the homes of various friends. But he never ceased hitting at Batista. After the general delivered a speech on June 4, declaring that "the government wants to be patient" but it is taken by some people as a "weakness," Castro shot back with an article in La Calle calling him "dishonest." He titled the article "Murderous Hands!"
The severe beating of Juan Manuel Márquez, an opposition leader, and the killing of Jorge Agostini, a former naval officer who had just returned from exile, marked open warfare between Batista and the Castro-led opposition. Castro accused the government of murdering Agostini, and that same night seven bombs exploded in Havana; Castro said it was the work of Batista's agents. The authorities countered by accusing Raúl Castro of having placed a bomb in a movie theater, and Fidel charged in a brief before the emergency court in Havana that the regime was planning to murder him and his brother. He also called for a strike in support of railroad workers who had suffered a pay cut. On June 15 the government forbade La Calle to print any more Castro articles (his last one was titled "Before Terror and Crime"); in effect, Fidel was silenced politically. La Calle was closed by the police the next day.
Castro's unpublished article was called "You Cannot Live Here Anymore," and it hinted heavily that he was preparing to go abroad, though it did not give the slightest indication that he planned to prepare an armed insurrection from exile. On June 17, Fidel instructed Raúl to seek asylum at the Mexican embassy in Havana; there were two court warrants out against him, and an assassination was feared. On June 24, Raúl left for Mexico, the first Movement rebel to take the long road
to invasion.
Before leaving, however, Raúl attended a secret meeting at an old house on Factoría Street near the Havana harbor where the National Directorate of the 26th of July Movement was organized on the night of June 12. Fidel, realizing he had to leave Cuba soon himself, felt it was imperative to leave behind a well-functioning organization to support the insurrection. He had learned the lesson of Moncada. This was the meeting Armando Hart mentioned thirty years later when he was reminiscing about the foundation of the Movement; every person who had been present, he said, was either still with the revolution or dead. The eleven-member National Directorate was composed of Fidel Castro, Pedro Miret, Jesús Montané, Melba Hernández, Haydée Santamaría, José Suárez Blanco, Pedro Celestino Aguilera, Ñico López, Armando Hart, Faustino Pérez, and Luis Bonito. The Moncada fighters were in the majority, but new blood had been added to the Movement.
On July 6, Fidel made his last preparations to leave Cuba. A Mexican tourist visa had been discreetly obtained for his passport, and Lidia sold her apartment refrigerator so that he could travel with a small amount of cash. Then she packed his suitcases with more books than clothes. On the afternoon of July 7, Castro left the apartment in an automobile with his sisters Lidia and Emma, his son, Fidelito (whom Lidia had brought along from school), and a woman lawyer. At the airport, Fidel embraced and kissed Fidelito, then boarded Flight 566 of the Mexican Aviation Company. He left behind this message, published by Bohemia in 250,000 copies:
"I am leaving Cuba because all doors of peaceful struggle have been closed to me. Six weeks after being released from prison I am convinced more than ever of the dictatorship's intention to remain in power for twenty years masked in different ways, ruling as now by the use of terror and crime and ignoring the patience of the Cuban people, which has its limits. As a follower of Martí, I believe the hour has come to take rights and not to beg for them, to fight instead of pleading for them. I will reside somewhere in the Caribbean. From trips such as this, one does not return or else one returns with the tyranny beheaded at one's feet."
CHAPTER
7
Fidel Castro arrived in exile in Mexico with the clear and specific purpose of organizing and training a rebel force that would land in Cuba to engage in guerrilla warfare in the Sierra Maestra. The guerrilla army would then defeat the Cuban armed forces, depose General Batista, and proclaim a revolutionary government on the island. To achieve his aim, he had at his command, as he set foot in Mexico, a few friends, limitless tenacity, and tremendous powers of persuasion.
"Sitting in front of me, Fidel Castro was shouting at me in my own house, gesticulating violently, as if we were in the midst of a great quarrel: 'You are a Cuban, you have the absolute duty to help us!' " This is the recollection of the late Alberto Bayo, the Cuban-born veteran officer and guerrilla specialist in the Republican army in the Spanish civil war, whom Castro tracked down immediately in Mexico City where the old soldier lived in self-exile.
In his book on directing the training of the Fidelista expedition, Bayo describes the encounter: "The young man was telling me that he expected to defeat Batista in a future landing that he planned to carry out with men 'when I have them,' and with vessels 'when I have the money to buy them,' because at the moment he was talking to me, he had neither a man nor a dollar. . . . Wasn't it amusing? Wasn't it a child's play? So he was asking me whether 'I would commit myself to teach guerrilla tactics to his future soldiers, when he had recruited them and when he had collected the money to feed, dress, and equip them, and buy ships to transport them to Cuba.' Come now, I thought, this young man wants to move mountains with one hand. But what did it cost me to please him? 'Yes,' I said. 'Yes, Fidel, I promise to instruct these boys the moment it is necessary.' Fidel Castro added, 'Well, I am going to the United States to gather men and money, and when I have them within seven or eight months, at the end of this year, I'll come back to see you and we shall plan what we have to do for our military training.' . . . We shook hands, and all this seemed impossible to me."
Castro must have heard of Bayo's reputation through the Latin American revolutionary grapevine when he reached Mexico City on the morning of July 8, 1955, after a night in Veracruz. He was wearing his old gray wool suit, and on meeting his brother Raúl and several other Cuban refugees the first evening, he admitted that "I almost wept when I took the plane" from Havana. But he instantly designed a plan, as he said later, to "reach influential persons in this country, whose friendship and sympathy could be useful." General Bayo was among the very first such persons whom Fidel went to see.
Alberto Bayo, frequently but falsely described as a Communist agent, was exactly the man Castro needed for his venture if it were to get off the ground. The amateurish military training of the surviving Moncada rebels was entirely inadequate for the invasion he was planning, and their lack of professionalism (including his own) could not be remedied by inspired readings of the memoirs of José Martí and the nineteenth-century guerrilla experiences of Generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo. What the 26th of July Movement had to have now was expertise in modern guerrilla warfare in tough mountain terrain against the sophisticated Batista arsenal. Bayo, an aging, white-haired man when Castro approached him in 1955, had fought for eleven years with the Spanish Army against Moorish guerrillas in the North African Rif in the 1920s. He campaigned against the fabled Abd-el-Krim, went on to study guerrilla warfare at the Spanish Military Academy at Toledo, then taught his favorite subject at the Salamanca staff school. During the Spanish civil war, he argued for the greater use of guerrilla forces by the Republicans against Franco's better-armed Nationalists. He reminded his superiors that the guerrilla was invented in Spain, and used first to expel the Moors in the fifteenth century, then Napoleon's French legions in 1808. Now General Bayo was telling Fidel Castro that "the man of the guerrilla is invincible when he can rely on the support of the peasants in place"
The Spaniard had spent his years in exile training both leftist and anti-Communist rebels throughout the Caribbean for assaults on dictatorships in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. In the mid-1950s, Bayo was teaching French and English at the Latin American University in Mexico, serving as professor at the Military Aviation Mechanics School, and running a furniture factory. Bayo told Castro that he could devote only three hours daily to his rebels after finishing his normal work, but Fidel protested: "No, General Bayo, we want from you the entire day. You must give up all your other occupations, and devote yourself fully to our training. Why would you want a furniture factory if inside a short time you will come with us, and we shall be together victorious in Cuba? . . ." The sixty-five-year-old general wrote that the young Castro "subjugated me, I became intoxicated with his enthusiasm, and he conveyed his optimism to me," and "then and there I promised Fidel to resign from my classes here and to sell my business."
Bayo never collected the approximately six thousand dollars he had been promised for the sale of his factory, and he lost a monthly income of around three hundred dollars. Unbeknownst to his wife, Bayo said, Castro gave him sixty-five dollars monthly "to continue the fiction" that the factory produced an income, but discovering the truth three months later, she took on additional teaching duties to keep the family in food. Bayo refused further payments from the nearly destitute Cubans; he later wrote books to raise money so he could repay Castro the $195 he had given him at the beginning. Having signed up Bayo, Fidel could start moving ahead with the organization of his insurrection.
Despite his lack of material resources, Castro had a fairly precise battle plan in mind even before leaving Havana. Pedro Miret, who worked closely with Fidel throughout the whole period, says that Castro's decision to go to Mexico was based on a decision he had already made to land a rebel force in Oriente. He recalls that "all this had already been thought out, including the landing zone as well as the place where we would go in the Sierra. . . . I knew about it even before Fidel left for Mexico." Miret explains that the concept of going to the Sier
ra evolved after Moncada (Castro had actually wanted to launch a guerrilla operation in the mountains above Santiago following his escape from the barracks), and that the idea of operating in the mountains was linked to "mass activities" elsewhere in Cuba. He says that "without mass support activities, there would be no possibility of triumph." This was one of the lessons of Moncada. Miret makes the point that after July 26, a new attack on army facilities was out of the question.
According to Miret, he and Fidel had narrowed down the landing area to a zone between Niquero on the west coast of Oriente province that juts out like a huge peninsula into the sea, and the small port of Pilón on the south coast, some forty miles away along the tortuous seashore. They had formulated the idea of landing in a specific spot of Oriente just before Castro departed for Mexico, and he acted rapidly to refine it. Miret had traveled to the Oriente peninsula in September, studying the terrain, the beaches, and the surf along the coast between Niquero and Pilón. He was accompanied by Frank País, the twenty-year-old regional coordinator of the 26th of July Movement in Santiago and one of its most influential leaders, and by Celia Sánchez, the dark-haired thirty-four-year-old daughter of a physician in the town of Media Luna, who would later become Fidel's most intimate companion and associate in the Sierra.
Miret's inclination was to land on the beaches near Pilón, and Celia obtained from the navy office there depth and tide charts for that section of the coast after their little group had inspected it. Celia was one of five daughters of a patriotic and radical-minded physician named Manuel Sánchez. One day when she was an adolescent, her father took her up Pico Turquino in the Sierra Maestra, Cuba's tallest mountain, to place a bust of José Martí at the peak. The Sánchezes were an Ortodoxo family, and Dr. Sánchez had seen enough human misery at the sugar mill where he practiced as a company doctor to develop very strong notions about social justice. Celia took after him politically, and she traveled to Havana following the release of Fidel Castro and his companions from the Isle of Pines prison to see if she could be of help to the Movement. Celia visited the Ortodoxo party headquarters, apparently hoping to meet Fidel, but she did not find him there. According to friends, Celia wanted to persuade Castro that he should pursue his war in the Sierra Maestra, and she even brought some maps with her. However, she met Pedro Miret, and he remembers discussing the subject with her. In September, Miret and Frank País, who knew Celia very well, contacted her for assistance with the coast survey. Obtaining the charts was the first service she rendered the revolution and Fidel Castro. Miret then flew to Mexico to hand the maps, the charts, and all other relevant information to Castro.