Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  It was Castro who had identified himself to the peasants. On the high ground above the mangrove, the rebels came upon the shack of Ángel Pérez Rosabal, a charcoal burner and the first person they saw ashore. Castro said, "Have no fear, I am Fidel Castro, and we came to liberate the Cuban people." This was exactly the sort of thing that Castro would say, but official accounts that Rosabal, a destitute and illiterate peasant living in a poor and thinly populated area, had heard of Castro beforehand are less than credible. In any event, Rosabal invited Castro and several of his men inside his hut and shared food with them. At that moment, hearing powerful explosions along the coast, Fidel ordered a forced march into nearby hills, with Rosabal guiding the column. The explosions came from a bombardment of the mangrove by a coast-guard vessel and army aircraft after the discovery of the Granma, and Castro feared that air attacks would be made on coastal huts as well. Most likely, a peasant in the area had heard Castro introducing himself to Rosabal, and had passed the word on to Rural Guard soldiers. Rosabal himself returned to his home by midafternoon. In the hills the hungry rebels came upon two other peasants, who showed them a well and gave them water; they also found a beehive and helped themselves to honey.

  While the Castro contingent halted for the night on a wooded hill, their first night in Cuba, the regime claimed total victory. Rural Guard units and an artillery battalion converged on Niquero, where a rebel attack was expected, and additional reinforcements were ordered to the region. Although government forces failed to locate the rebels that Sunday, General Pedro Rodríguez Ávila, the army inspector general in command of the operations in Oriente, informed the press that military aircraft had "strafed and bombed tonight the expeditionary force, annihilating forty members of the supreme command of the revolutionary 26th of July movement . . . among them its chief, Fidel Castro, thirty years old." The general said further that the army had collected the bodies of the rebels, and that, besides Fidel, the cadavers of Raúl Castro and Juan Manuel Márquez were identified by documents in their pockets. The rebels, the general reported, were "literally pulverized" by the air attacks, and official sources indicated that the bodies would be brought to Havana by navy ships after having been "temporarily" buried in shallow ground. This army report was the origin of the news, disseminated worldwide by Francis McCarthy, the United Press bureau chief in Havana, that Castro had been killed, and that his identity was confirmed by the passport he carried in his pocket. At first, the story was believed in Cuba and abroad, but before long the Batista regime paid a dear price in credibility for false reporting (Castro never forgave McCarthy for prematurely announcing his death; the UP newsman had to leave Cuba when the Fidelistas won).

  The Sierra Maestra is a massif rising along the south coast of Oriente province, from the western foothills right past Cabo Cruz all the way to Santiago in the east. It runs roughly eighty miles on a west-east line, and some thirty miles at its broadest north-south stretch. The spine, called el firme in Spanish, averages 4,500 in altitude, and its highest point (also Cuba's highest) is Pico Turquino, slightly over 6,000 feet. The Sierra Maestra's terrain is forbidding—mountain peaks and valleys, forest and boulders, rivers and creeks—even today the region is poor and sparsely inhabited. At the time of Fidel Castro's sojourn there, it was almost wholly isolated from the rest of the country, with no major paved highways and dirt roads often impassable because of drenching rains that turned them into ribbons of deep, red mud. Tough as it was to move through these mountains, the Sierra Maestra was ideal guerrilla territory. From the moment his expedition came ashore at Los Cayuelos, and the plan to take Niquero and Media Luna was aborted, Castro had to break out of the western foothills, where the rebels were so vulnerable to air and ground attacks, to the impenetrable safety of the Sierra Maestra. As they marched east, the men's orders were always to keep the low-flying sugarcane fields on their left and the mountains on their right in order to reach the Sierra haven.

  Although Castro always planned to launch the war from the Sierra Maestra and all the preparations ashore by his local supporters were geared to it, doubt remains as to the precise strategy he had in mind when he landed in Cuba. Faustino Pérez, who was one of Fidel's two Chiefs of Staff, says that while they were sailing on the Granma, "none of us was convinced that the struggle would develop fundamentally through [the creation of] an army in the mountains." He explains that "the vision we had was that of a nationally organized Movement, thinking about a general strike and also about a guerrilla [force] focus that would have a very great symbolic importance, but not in the sense that it would signify at a given moment the possibility of defeating the army of the tyranny." But Faustino adds, "What happened was that the companions who stayed in. the mountains began acquiring confidence, the guerrilla was growing, blows were being dealt to the army of the tyranny, and it became conceivable that in this fashion a revolutionary army capable of defeating the forces of the tyranny could be built." At the same time, he says, urban groups of the 26th of July Movement believed that much could be achieved through struggle in the cities.

  Fidel Castro, on the other hand, had a different appreciation of the basic rebel strategy—or, at least, he has it now. In an interview twenty years after the start of the guerrilla war, he said that "we did not arrive there [in the Sierra] with the purpose of creating a center of disturbance throughout the island and the problem would be solved by a military coup, we always fought the idea of a coup." This difference between Pérez and Castro in interpreting the initial strategy of the guerrilla war is extremely important in understanding the whole Cuban revolutionary process, because the argument over whether the overall leadership should be centered in the Sierra or shared with the urban underground soon turned into the war's central political issue. Subsequently, it led to the disappearance of the 26th of July Movement and the emergence of "unity" under the sway of Castro's new Communist party. In all fairness, however, the record shows that on numerous occasions before the December 1956 landing, Fidel had forcefully argued that a revolution could be accomplished with the existing army and that Faustino himself recognized that the rebels must create their own armed forces. Faustino himself now recognizes that once Castro was established in the Sierra, a true Rebel Army became possible. Meanwhile, Castro's immediate priority after spending that uncomfortable first night on Cuban soil was to reach the Sierra Maestra.

  The story of how Castro was able to recover from a terrible initial defeat, regroup, fight, start winning against Batista units, and form an ultimately victorious Rebel Army is the story of the extraordinary support he received from Sierra Maestra peasants. Without this support, first from individuals and then from whole networks of peasants, Fidel would never have survived the initial weeks in the mountains nor would he have been able to organize the guerrillas. In the beginning peasants and their families hid and protected the little, poorly armed, and famished rebel band; they served as principal channels for obtaining food, arms and ammunition, and all other kinds of supplies from what could be found in the Sierra or brought up from the urban underground groups, and, finally, they served as the source of manpower. It was not a peasant revolution that gave Fidel Castro power, but there would have been no revolution without the peasants. Moreover, it was Castro who knew how to inspire this astounding display of solidarity and sacrifice despite the danger it presented to the peasants' lives.

  The story of Fidel Castro's rebels and the Sierra Maestra peasants begins with the debacle at Alegría de Pío on Wednesday, December 5, when the Rural Guard ambushed, dispersed, and nearly annihilated the expeditionary force on its fourth day in Cuba. The men had spent their second night, from December 3 to December 4, in a clearing on another wooded hill called La Trocha. They had marched east all day over a boulder-strewn path, guided by Tato Vega, the son of a peasant at whose shack they had stopped at noon. The expeditionaries dined on rice and black beans and had a good rest. Tato Vega left them, saying he was going home, and it never occurred to the still inexperienced guerrilla
leaders that he would look for Rural Guard units to report the rebels' presence in the area. This was one of the rare acts of betrayal of the rebels in the Sierra, and it resulted in a catastrophe. On Tuesday, December 4, the Castro column resumed the march east, coming to a tiny charcoal burners' village called Agua Fina where a Spanish storeowner gave them some canned sausage and crackers. Because the terrain ahead of them now turned into canefields, where they could be spotted by aircraft, Fidel decided to march all night after a brief dinner pause. They arrived at Alegría de Pío on the morning of December 5, in a state of absolute exhaustion; it had taken them three days and two nights over rocks and boulders to cover the twenty-two miles from the landing point to the low hillside where Castro now ordered them to set up camp.

  In this he committed two major mistakes. The first was the choice of a low unprotected hill jutting into the canefield instead of a higher and wooded hill nearby. But the men were so fatigued that he hesitated to ask them to advance another several hundred yards; the nocturnal uphill march over rocks that Cubans call "dog fangs," with expeditionaries continuously stumbling and falling and even fainting (several of them smashing their eyeglasses), had been too much. The second mistake was to deploy sentries too near the camp, thereby cutting down the warning time when the attack came. Castro had paid no attention to the trail of sugarcane debris the men were leaving behind as they sucked pieces of cane during the march. And, finally, there was the treason of Tato Vega, the guide. Shortly after 4:00 P.M. on December 5, the men awoke and were each given a piece of sausage, a cracker, and a mouthful of condensed milk. Quite a few rebels had taken off their boots to wrap bandages around their bleeding feet. At 4:30 P.M., in the words of Raúl Castro, "The hecatomb began . . . we were ambushed by the army." The hundred-man Rural Guard company, firing machine guns and rifles at the rebels, turned the hillside into what Raúl described as an "inferno." The revolutionary contingent simply came apart.

  Fidel kept firing his rifle while roaring out commands for an orderly retreat, hoping his men could hide in the canefields and regroup. But as at Moncada, it was too late, and it had to be each man for himself. Che Guevara was hit by a bullet in the lower shoulder, and Faustino Pérez, who was next to him, thought the Argentine had been killed. Guevara wrote in his diary that "I thought of myself as dead, and I told Faustino from the ground, 'They fucked me'. . . . Immediately, I began to think about the best way of dying in that minute when all seemed lost. I remembered an old story by Jack London in which the protagonist, leaning against a tree trunk, prepares to end his life with dignity, knowing he was condemned to freeze to death in the frozen plains of Alaska. This is the only image I remember." Actually, Che's wound was superficial and he escaped the trap, moving east with four companions, including Juan Almeida and Ramiro Valdés. Fidel, Faustino, and Universo Sánchez found themselves together later that afternoon and started their odyssey under the sugarcane straw. Several men had to physically drag Castro away from the battlefield.

  The Rebel Army was destroyed. Three expeditionaries are known to have been killed in battle that afternoon. Many of them inside the burning canefields, the remaining seventy-nine men broke up into twenty-six separate groups, like Fidel's and Che's, though many of the "groups" consisted of only a single individual. One of them was Juan Manuel Márquez, the second Chief of Staff, who was quickly captured by the army and brutally murdered. Jesús Montané was captured and taken to prison in Havana. Twenty-one others were also known to have been executed within a day or two, twenty-two were caught and imprisoned, and nineteen more simply vanished; some made their way out of the Sierra to return home and hide, or surrender, some were never seen again. Of the eighty-two men who landed from the Granma on December 2, only sixteen survived Alegría de Pío and the dispersal to pursue the war. However, the entire leadership, except for Juan Manuel Márquez and Ñico López (also captured and executed), stayed alive to fight another day. Apart from Fidel and Che, among the sixteen survivors were Raúl, Faustino Pérez, Juan Almeida, Ramiro Valdés, and Camilo Cienfuegos, though Fidel would not know about them for a number of days. Still, as he lay under the sugarcane paja with his two companions, Fidel whispered day and night how and when they would regroup and go back into battle. As Faustino Pérez remembers, "This was the great lesson of faith and optimism—as well as of realism—that Fidel taught us in those days." But none of it would have helped Castro, had it not been for the peasants of Sierra Maestra.

  In the aftermath of Alegría de Pío, General Batista and his government were absolutely convinced that Fidel Castro was dead and his expeditionary force completely smashed. With so many prisoners captured by the army, Batista was justified in assuming that the danger was over; even if Castro had not yet been physically located, it was obviously a question of time before he was. Consequently, on December 13 the army high command withdrew most of the combat units from the Sierra Maestra region, leaving behind normal Rural Guard garrisons in towns and villages; aerial surveillance was likewise canceled. An official communiqué said the command considered "the insurrectional movement" to have ended. And Fidel's relatives, friends, and followers were just as certain that the great revolutionary adventure had collapsed and that Fidel and Raúl were most likely dead. Their mother, Lina Ruz de Castro, told a Holguín newspaper that "if they let me go up the Niquero mountains, I shall make them come down with me. . . . I suffer as the mother of soldiers and revolutionaries, but if Fidel and Raúl decide to die, I wish they would die with dignity. . . . I weep for my sons, and I would embrace the same way the mothers of the companions of my sons as the mothers of the soldiers who have died in this painful war."

  Still in mourning after her husband's death in October, Lina Ruz de Castro then traveled to Santiago with her oldest son, Ramón, to settle inheritance problems—including Fidel's and Raúl's inheritances—and hoping for news of them. Ramón Castro said they had learned nothing, and that "there is nothing concrete to demonstrate that they killed [Fidel] or that he is alive. . . . I believe that if my brother had died in combat, the government would have already announced it officially." He was right on that score because three weeks after Alegría de Pío, there was absolutely no information about Fidel's fate. Marta Rojas, the reporter who had covered Castro's "History Will Absolve Me" speech in the Santiago hospital after Moncada, wrote in Bohemia magazine that Fidelito, now back in Havana with his mother, Mirta (whose new husband was the son of Cuba's chief delegate to the United Nations), kept asking, "Has Papa written? Where is Papa?" Mirta also insisted that she had not kidnapped Fidelito in Mexico, and that his paternal aunts, Lidia and Emma, had voluntarily surrendered him to her.

  Throughout December the Cuban press maintained the sense of uncertainty about Castro (censorship had been lifted again), with growing hints that he might well be alive and preparing to reappear. Statements by two captured rebels provided a fairly accurate account of the Granma's voyage and the expedition's first days ashore, offering Cubans some idea of what had happened. Che Guevara was still unknown in Cuba, and published reports spoke of "an Argentine physician named Guevara" as part of the Castro force. Late in December the Holguín newspaper reported that Fidel, Raúl, and forty men had been camping since the eighteenth of the month south of Turquino peak in the Sierra Maestra; their guide was identified as a peasant named Crescencio Pérez who was said to have been arrested.

  This was a fascinating piece of confusion for Fidel's friends and foes alike. Actually, it was on December 16 that Fidel, Faustino, and Universo had reached the Cinco Palmas farmhouse of Ramón "Mongo" Pérez in Purial de Vicana on the Vicana River, some thirty-five tortuous miles northeast of Alegría de Pío. Mongo Pérez was the brother of Crescencio Pérez, one of the two key members of the 26th of July Movement's peasant underground who under Celia Sánchez's command had vainly awaited the Granma's arrival on the last day of November. The other member of the peasant underground was Guillermo García Frías. The original plan did provide for the expeditionaries to make Mongo Pérez'
s farm their first operational headquarters in the Sierra Maestra, but the farm was at least seventy-five miles in a straight line west of the Turquino area where Fidel's presence had been reported. Crescencio Pérez ran the Movement's peasant network, but he was not Fidel's guide. It was not Crescencio who was arrested; it was his son Sergio, who was accompanying a fourteen-man group of rebels fleeing south to the coast from Alegría de Pío. Six of these expeditionaries were captured, tortured, and executed. Fidel was naturally unaware of newspaper reports, but they were most helpful in that they served to confirm that he was alive, thereby preventing the collapse of the entire Movement in the country, while totally misleading the authorities as to where he was really hiding.

  It took Fidel and his two companions six days to reach Mongo's farm, with crucial help from Sierra peasants. They left their canefield hideout after dark on December 10, five days after the disastrous battle, walking slowly and carefully in single line, with Universo usually the point man. Guided by the stars and their instinct, they covered two and a half miles that night, moving northeast. Spending all day in another canefield, the trio resumed the march on the evening of December 11 and reached a forest-canopied mountain called La Conveniencia after midnight. The canefields were behind them, the terrain was less rocky, and they could advance more rapidly. The silhouette of the Sierra Maestra massif, now discernible in the moonlight, served as a reference point. Below La Conveniencia, the mountain dipped sharply to the Toro River, with the Sierra Maestra itself beginning on the far side. Fidel spotted a thatched-roof peasant house down the hillside, but he chose to observe it very carefully from about three hundred yards in the forest before risking a contact. In a downpour that seemed never to end, the three men watched the house the rest of the night and much of the next day; they had no food, no water, they were drenched, and Universo who had lost his boots at Alegría de Pío, was suffering from having to walk barefoot. When Fidel was convinced that the peasant family was engaged in normal activities—and that there were no soldiers around—he told Faustino to go down to the house. It was 4:00 P.M. of December 12, over sixteen hours after they had arrived at La Conveniencia.