Fidel: A Critical Portrait

by Tad Szulc

  The peasants were mountain coffee growers, Daniel Hidalgo and his wife, Cota Coello. On Fidel's instructions, Faustino requested food for twenty or twenty-five men to give the impression they were a large force. Then, Fidel and Universo joined Faustino at the house. Their hosts slaughtered a piglet, and the three rebels feasted on the meat and vegetables; it was also the first time in seven days that they had drunk water. Daniel Hidalgo had heard about a landing by armed men on the coast, and he told Fidel he had heard about him, too. They spent the rest of the afternoon discussing the best ways of penetrating the Sierra Maestra, and at night Fidel decided to move out again. Led by one of Hidalgo's sons, the three revolutionaries went down a narrow canyon, crossed the Toro River, climbed Copal heights, and continued several miles to Yerba heights. Now they were inside the Sierra Maestra.

  On the morning of December 13, after walking all night and covering eight miles through the Sierra forest, Castro and his companions arrived at the house of Rubén and Walterio Tejeda, two brothers who belonged to the peasant network of the 26th of July Movement. Finally, they had made contact with the organization, and they no longer had to depend on luck and their own and virtually nonexistent resources. Following a three-hour rest and a meal of malanga roots and milk, the trio continued through the mountains to a farmhouse near the village of El Plátano. This was the mountain fief of the García family, really a tribe, and it was also the home of Guillermo García Frías, a childhood friend of Celia Sánchez's and for nearly two years an active member of the Movement—recruited by Celia—who had been among those awaiting the rebel landing on November 30. But the first García whom Fidel met that noon in a field was Guillermo's father, Adrían García, who was carrying a bucket filled with rice, bread, coffee, and milk. He had heard that there were rebels in the area, and he was looking for them with food literally in his hands. Castro had not yet realized how efficient the Sierra communications network was, so he introduced himself to the old man as "Alejandro," his code name, only to be greeted as "Fidel." Later in the day, around twenty young peasants came to the farmhouse to offer their services to the Rebel Army, and Castro promised to take them as soon as he could organize this army. However, his immediate concern was to get to the Mongo Pérez farmhouse, still farther to the northeast, because he hoped to find enough of the other expeditionaries there to rebuild his force. But first he had to break through the isolation cordon the army had left around the Sierra Maestra's main massif; this meant crossing the heavily guarded Pilón-Niquero highway that separated Castro from Mongo's house. To get across the highway, he needed Guillermo García to guide him. Guillermo was somewhere in the mountains searching for lost rebels (he had watched the Alegría de Pío battle from a mountaintop) and abandoned arms. Fidel decided to wait for him at El Plátano, where he felt reasonably safe. Word went out through the Sierra for Guillermo to rush home.

  Guillermo García arrived at his finca at one o'clock in the morning of Friday, December 14, and he and Fidel immediately launched into an all-night conversation. It was a memorable occasion in the history of the Cuban revolution because Guillermo not only became the first peasant to join the Rebel Army, but he would become one of its top commanders and, later, a key member of the Fidelista regime. If there was a single individual in the Sierra who can be credited with helping Castro survive and win, it certainly was this tough, squat twenty-seven-year-old peasant.

  Guillermo is also one of the most interesting personages of the Cuban revolution. His background and allegiances go far to explain why from the outset Fidel Castro was able to command the tremendous support of the mountain peasantry. He was one of eleven children in a family that barely subsisted on what it could grow in the rocky soil and what it could earn from landowners of the large properties in the area. One peso (a dollar) a day was normal pay in the 1950s. Guillermo recalls that the nearest doctor was in Niquero, a day's horseback journey from the finca (two of his brothers had died of gastroenteritis as babies), and he charged two pesos for a visit. "My physician was my mother with her medicinal herbs from the fields," he says. The nearest school, a multigrade elementary school, was three miles away in the mountains, and Guillermo quit after the fourth grade at the age of ten to go to work. He helped the family in the fields, tended the landowners' cattle (becoming something of a cattleman himself), and while still a child, accompanied an uncle selling produce in the region.

  He met Celia Sánchez for the first time when he was twelve years old. He and his uncle went every week to deliver vegetables to her family's house in Media Luna, which was twenty-seven miles, or twenty-four hours, away on horseback. Celia, who was eight years older than Guillermo, was always politically active, he says, and she enlisted him in the 26th of July Movement in 1955, two years after Moncada. Guillermo García recalls that he was captivated by her explanations of how the Castro ideas represented the aspirations of all young Cubans, particularly given the culture of poverty in which families of his social class had to live. Cuba being a small island, historical and political traditions are important, and they are passed on from generation to generation, even among the poorest of the population. However, peasants and slaves had fought colonizers in the nineteenth century, and Guillermo emphasizes that his grandfather, Bautista Frías Figueredo, was a veteran of the 1895 and 1898 independence wars. During the Spanish-American War over Cuba, Guillermo's ancestors fled to the mountains from the plains of Oriente "to constitute something of a tribe, and then we emerged as a new generation, the third peasant generation." In this sense, Guillermo thinks it was only logical for him to join the 26th of July Movement. Three of his brothers also joined the Rebel Army. One was killed, one ascended to the rank of general, as Guillermo did, and the third one returned to the mountains.

  After the Alegría de Pío battle, Guillermo was all over the place. Knowing the area like the back of his hand, he coordinated rescues of lost rebels and picked up a half-dozen survivors personally. Among them was Calixto Moráles, the soldier almost executed for indiscipline in the Mexican training camp when he refused to take part in forced marches because of a back condition to which he would not admit. Moráles was found by another peasant who then turned him over to Guillermo, and soon he rejoined Fidel to fight the rest of the war. García says the rebels were passed "very safely, from peasant to peasant because there, in that zone, all the peasants were really organized. . . . I had perfect security because I knew the political affiliation of every peasant as well as their morality. Those who had bad morality, I sought to isolate totally." But some of the men saved by Guillermo did not choose to go on looking for Castro.

  Fidel and his two companions were in a terrible physical state when he met them that night, Guillermo says, and Faustino Pérez was a "human rag" from exhaustion, hunger, and deep cuts from mountain vegetation. Castro, however, "was incredible" He started interrogating me about our organization, about the program he had, how we were going to organize the peasants, how we were going to collect arms for the sierra, how many shotguns we would need, and so forth. . . . It seemed like he already had an army with him. . . . So I decided to stick with him." Without having slept for forty-eight hours, Castro talked all night. He wanted to know everything about army movements, the sentiments of the population in the region, and which individuals were reliable and which were not.

  Late on Friday, December 14, Guillermo and two of his friends escorted Fidel, Faustino, and Universo down the mountain to a canefield near the village of La Manteca, stopping twice en route for meals at peasants' homes. The canefield was just off the highway they had to cross to enter the heart of the Sierra Maestra, and Guillermo wanted to wait for a safe moment when there were no army patrols around. They waited for over twenty-four hours until Guillermo decided that the Saturday night sound of music from the jukebox in a bar at the edge of the highway, singing and shouting, and noise from a nearby power plant would drown whatever commotion their movements might cause. Flat on the ground, the six men dragged themselves to the mouth of a dra
inage culvert under the highway, traversing it to the other side. It took three minutes to get through the mud and rotting, stinking matter inside the pipe; Guillermo had proposed this as the safest way to cross, and Fidel approved the idea. Afterward, the men marched for eleven hours up and down mountainsides, covering twenty-five miles and stopping only once to rest, and finally arrived at Mongo Pérez's farmhouse at seven o'clock in the morning on Sunday, December 16. It was exactly two weeks after landing in Cuba that Fidel Castro attained safety—and the real possibility of waging a war.

  At Mongo Pérez's farm, Fidel set up camp in the middle of a canefield; now the three of them could eat, drink, rest, and sleep. Castro's plan was to wait there a number of days for some of the other expeditionaries to join them, then start moving again. Through the peasant information network he learned that Granma companions were in the area the day he arrived, so he sent out the tireless Guillermo to look for them. On Tuesday, December 18, Raúl Castro and four others reached a farmhouse less than a mile from his brother's camp; for a week now they, too, had been guided and fed by Sierra peasants. At every stop, Raúl made a point of leaving a handwritten note, signed by him as "Captain," to be displayed after the revolution as proof of the help the peasants had given the rebels. Informed that Fidel was in the nearby canefield, Raúl sent a peasant over with his Mexican driver's license so his brother would know he was approaching with his men. Fidel, always careful, sent the peasant back with test questions for Raúl, to confirm his identity further. Just before midnight, the brothers embraced in the canefield. Fidel asked Raúl: "How many rifles did you bring?" and Raúl replied, "Five . . ." Fidel shouted: "And with the two I have, this makes seven! Now, yes, we have won the war!" The next day, Calixto Moráles arrived, unarmed. The Rebel Army consisted now of nine men and seven rifles.

  There was no time to waste. On December 20, Fidel sent Mongo Pérez to Manzanillo on the northwest coast of Oriente province, and then on to Santiago to inform Movement leaders there that the guerrilleros were alive and well. He also gave Mongo an enormous list of instructions concerning his needs for food, weapons, supplies, and men. Raúl noted in his diary that day that the peasants "have a fairly good organization, and we are perfecting it, especially in liaison and espionage . . . any movement by anyone in these surroundings is immediately communicated to us." In the evening Fidel moved their camp to a coffee field nearby, close to a creek where they could bathe and swim.

  The group of eight rebels, including Che Guevara, Juan Almeida, Ramiro Valdés, and Camilo Cienfuegos—all future revolutionary chiefs—met their first peasants on December 13 after a week of wandering aimlessly between the south coast and the foothills of the Sierra Maestra. At a farmhouse sheltered by trees, the eight, so exhausted they could not take another step, spent all night in what Che described as "an uninterrupted festival of food." Then since their stomachs were unaccustomed to copious eating, all eight became violently ill. The next day, the peasants gave them fresh clothes to replace their torn uniforms, and the rebels split up into two groups. Except for Che and Almeida, who held on to their submachine guns, the rebels left their weapons behind at the peasants' farmhouse as they resumed the march to the northeast; they already knew from their hosts that Fidel was alive and awaiting them. Hearing that the army had picked up their scent, Che, Almeida, and two other rebels hid at a house in El Mamey, a few miles away, that belonged to a Seventh Day Adventist lay preacher named Argelio Rosabal, another extraordinary figure from the Sierra. Not far from them, at another farmhouse Camilo Cienfuegos was concealed inside a dry well.

  Rosabal, who was a sugarcane field worker during the week and "with the church on Saturdays," remembers meeting a group of four rebels three days after Alegría de Pío near his house in the mountains just west of Pilón. He knew there had been a battle involving armed men from a ship, and he gave coffee and clean clothes to the four men who went on, never to be seen again. They told Rosabal that they had come to "liberate Cuba." The lay preacher thereupon went to his church, gathered fifteen or twenty fellow Adventists, and told them that "the men who came with the mission, they say, to do away with a little of our misery. . . . must be saved." He said that "all of you must take an interest in their lives, and when you learn that there is one or more of them around, take them in . . . if you have no courage to do it, advise me . . ." A few days later, Rosabal was informed that a group of eight men were hiding in the Sierra house of one of his friends (this was the band that included Che and Almeida) and at that point the lay preacher moved the four to his house. The next step, he says, was to get them marching again. Rosabal recalls: "As I am a man of God, I say, 'The situation is not easy, so let us pray . . .' We all knelt, and I begged God to help me in this situation." Che Guevara, who affectionately referred to Rosabal as "the Pastor," knelt probably for the first time in his life.

  Led by Rosabal, Che, still suffering from his shoulder wound, and the three other men marched all night until they reached the house of the Adventist's sister-in-law, where a chicken was killed for a meal. Che threw up twice before his stomach could hold the chicken broth, then Rosabal removed the men's boots and stood guard over them as they slept. The next morning, Che asked Rosabal if he could send "anonymous" telegrams to their families; the Pastor said he would try. Placing a sheet of paper with family addresses in a basket of red beans, he walked down the mountain to Pilón and to the house of Celia Sánchez's father, whom he knew well. Since he was unaware that the Sánchez family belonged to the clandestine Movement, he produced the list of names Che had given him only when he satisfied himself that the doctor would protect the rebels.

  Returning to the farmhouse, Rosabal discovered that the army had captured one of the rebels from the original group of eight—he had been left behind because of a high fever—and had seized the weapons left in the house. Now it was urgent to send Che and his three companions far into the Sierra Maestra, and on December 16, Guillermo García (who happened to be Rosabal's brother-in-law) arrived from Mongo's farm to be their guide. He reassembled the men hiding in the area into a group of six, and at dawn on December 21 they arrived at Mongo's homestead to rejoin the Castro brothers (Raúl wrote in his diary that among the survivors was "my inseparable friend, Ramiro Valdés"). Che reached the finca in the midst of an asthma attack, which he overcame. And Guillermo told Che and his companions: "You will never know how much this man Rosabal did for you . . ."

  Indeed, there seemed no limit to what the peasants were willing to do for the Castro guerrillas. Argeo González, a storekeeper and itinerant merchant in the Sierra when the rebels arrived, explains that "the reason all the peasants helped them was that they learned the truth about the struggle against tyranny. . . . The landowners didn't let anybody else work the land, it was all theirs. . . . Peasants had no way out without a revolution." Argeo was among the first regular volunteer suppliers of the incipient Rebel Army, running food and arms up the Sierra Maestra from lowland towns, and he says that although the peasants did not know Castro at the outset, "he earned their confidence, helping them, and not mistreating them." When a Rural Guard trooper visited a mountain house, Argeo recalls, "he would receive bread, eat a chicken if there was one there, take away a daughter if there was one there—but the rebels were different; they respected everything, and this was the basis of the confidence that they gained." When a rebel would get out of line, he says, Castro would instantly punish him, sometimes have him executed. Peasant women, according to Argeo, were soon "the first ones to want to join Castro, to help him." At the same time, the rebels told the peasants that after the revolution the land would belong to them, to those who worked the land. Universo Sánchez remembers that Fidel insisted on paying ten pesos for a chicken even if it was worth only five.

  Mario Sariol, another Sierra merchant turned secret rebel quartermaster, remembers meeting Castro in a coffee field early in 1957 and being embraced by him after offering to prepare food for the rebels. He recalls that Fidel's beard was just beginning to gro
w, and Raúl had "a few hairs, nothing more, and they seemed like youths." (Actually, Castro had decided in the beginning that the rebels should not even try to shave while in the mountains; in their Mexican training camp, General Bayo had made them throw out their razors and toothbrushes "because you won't have them where you're going . . .") As Sariol tells the story, the peasants developed a protective feeling about the Fidelistas. When Sariol ran out of funds to purchase food for them in the town of Las Mercedes, the local merchant told him, "Mario, don't let these people go hungry even for one day; come here and take what you need." He never accepted payment, and Sariol says that later Castro ordered him to keep track of all food caches, making certain there was enough for the peasants as well as the rebels. Sergio Casanova, an enthusiastic peasant volunteer, was turned down by Castro when it turned out he had six children and no income other than occasional day's work. Fidel told him: "You can't go with us. . . . Who would look after your family?" Remembering those days, Casanova says, "To me, Fidel was a god."