Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
*
Che’s command was called the “Fourth Column” in order to confuse the enemy as to the Rebel Army’s real troop strength. Cuban historians often cite Che’s promotion as evidence of the high regard Fidel felt for him, pointing out that he had been favored over Fidel’s brother, without offering any explanation as to why Raúl hadn’t earned the honor. But Che’s laconic diary entry for that fateful day may hold part of the answer. “There were several promotions. I [now] had the rank of
comandante
. The
guajiro
Luis [Crespo] was given the rank of lieutenant, Ciro [Redondo] captain, and Raúl Castro, who had been stripped of rank for an insubordination of his entire platoon, was named lieutenant.” Exactly
what
happened between Raúl and his men was left out of Che’s later public writings and all official histories of the Cuban revolution. Today, despite an increasing openness about some aspects of revolutionary history, Cuba’s historians would probably still have a hard time dredging up such details.
*
The July 26 Movement had a flourishing underground operating among the Cuban employees at the Guantánamo base and had been stealing weapons and ammunition from its stores since before the
Granma
expedition. Like most of the wartime rebel correspondence quoted here, this comes from Carlos Franqui’s
Diary of the Cuban Revolution
.
*
Che acknowledged his period of doubt—in which this episode was an important milestone—in his farewell letter to Fidel, written as he left for the Congo in 1965. “Reviewing my past life, I believe I have worked with sufficient integrity and dedication to consolidate the revolutionary triumph. My only serious failing was not having had more confidence in you from the first moments in the Sierra Maestra, and not having understood quickly enough your qualities as a leader and a revolutionary.”
*
See Notes for elaboration.
*
See Notes section.
*
By the end of the war, an estimated 10,000 head of cattle had been “liberated” in this fashion by the rebels in Oriente. Because many peasants became the owners of livestock for the first time in their lives, it was one of the Rebel Army’s most popular measures and won the support of numerous
guajiros
.
*
Bob Taber, the CBS journalist, would eventually cross the line altogether, helping to found the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and lobbying in the United States on behalf of the Castro government. Herbert Matthews’s early romantic boosterism of Fidel Castro undermined his journalistic credibility and ultimately damaged his career at
The New York Times
. The young Ecuadorean journalist Carlos Bastidas, who came to the sierra in early 1958, was determined to take up the Movement’s cause with the Organization of American States in Washington. Before he could leave the country, however, Bastidas was murdered by Batista’s intelligence police.
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Rojo had gone to work for his political mentor, Arturo Frondízi, who in 1956 formed the liberal Radical Party breakaway, the Union Cívica Radical Intransigente. When General Aramburu acceded to elections, Rojo was instrumental in setting up talks between Frondízi’s party and Perón—still powerful in exile—for the purpose of winning Frondízi the crucial
peronista
vote. The bid was successful: Frondízi won the presidential elections held in February 1958 and Rojo was repaid for his efforts with a diplomatic post in Bonn.
*
With the arms shipment came Pedro Miret, who had been in prison in Mexico at the time of the
Granma
’s sailing; he now rejoined Fidel as a member of his general staff. Accompanying him was Huber Matos, a Manzanillo schoolteacher and rice grower who had gone into exile after helping transport the first rebel reinforcements to the sierra the year before. Fidel made Matos an officer, and he would later become
comandante
of Column Nine. The pilot of the plane—which the rebels burned after unloading its cargo—was Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, a defector from Batista’s air force. Before the war was over, Díaz Lanz would make a number of arms deliveries to the rebels and would be named the revolution’s air force chief; later, he would become one of the Castro regime’s most dangerous enemies.
*
See Notes for elaboration.
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On June 8, amid the general chaos, a strange American visitor showed up at the rebel camp. Che wrote that he was “a suspicious gringo with messages from people in Miami and some eccentric plans.” The man wanted to see Fidel, but he was kept where he was. The next morning, after an intense aerial bombardment in the eastern part of the front around the village of Santo Domingo, Che found Fidel and told him about the visitor. “Fidel had received word that the gringo was either FBI or hired to kill him.” According to Pedro Álvarez Tabío, the director of the Cuban government’s historical archives, the visitor was probably Frank Fiorini, a gun-runner. Later, under the alias “Frank Sturgis,” Fiorini went to work for the CIA in its anti-Castro operations, and in the 1970s earned notoriety as one of the Watergate burglars.
*
See the Notes.
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Fidel persuaded Quevedo to join the Rebel Army. He was one of several army officers to do so in the course of the war.
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Rodríguez, who died in 1997, never said much about this trip, except that in Raúl’s zone he had found “nothing but understanding for the Communists, but when I got to Fidel in the Sierra Maestra, the understanding had turned to suspicion.” Rodríguez was undoubtedly referring to the antagonism his presence had provoked in Carlos Franqui, Faustino Pérez, and other llano men who were now in the sierra. Che seemed to have been alluding to this when he noted, a few days after Rodríguez’s departure, “the formation of an opposition directed by Faustino and composed also of Franqui and Aldo Santamaría [brother of Haydée and the late Abel Santamaría] in the Sierra Maestra.”
*
See Notes.
†
Che had many good men with him on his long march to the Escambray, but some began to suffer from what he called
apendijitis
, or yellowitis. “In an attempt to clean out the scum of the column,” he told Fidel, he had cashiered seven men on October 7. The next night, the American volunteer Herman Marks, who had a captain’s rank, left as well. Although Marks, who was a Korean War veteran, had been an excellent instructor of Che’s fighters and had proved himself repeatedly in battle, Che wasn’t sorry to see him go, and in his journal he wrote, “He was wounded and ill, but fundamentally, he didn’t fit into the troop.” Enrique
Acevedo explained in more detail: the American was “brave and crazy in combat, tyrannical and arbitrary in the peace of camp.” In particular, according to Enrique Acevedo, he had displayed a disquieting predilection for executing condemned men, often volunteering for the task with an enthusiasm that was unseemly.
*
After the revolution, Carreras returned to the Escambray with other disgruntled former rebels and took up arms in a guerrilla war against the revolution. He was captured and executed in 1961.
*
Oltuski had said this amount had been collected by the llano, and that part of it would be given to Che to show him they had enough support to make robbing banks unnecessary.
†
Oltuski had told Che that Víctor Paneque—Diego—the action chief for Las Villas, also opposed the bank robberies. Later, in his memoir of the episode, Oltuski wrote that Diego had reacted with shock when he heard of Che’s plans and said it was “craziness,” that it would alienate July 26 supporters, and that he was “sure” that Fidel wouldn’t approve such actions.
*
Aleida March published her memoir,
Evocación: mi vida al lado del Che
(Evocation: My Life at Che’s Side), in 2008. The book contains some previously unpublished poems Che wrote for her, as well as several of his letters to her.
*
The Communist sugar-union leader murdered by Casillas in 1948.
*
One of those shot, according to the historian Hugh Thomas, was Colonel Cornelio Rojas, the police commander. At the moment of his execution, Rojas asked to be allowed to give the firing order, and his request was granted.
*
Arenas described this secene in his memoir,
Before Night Falls
. He became a well-known writer but suffered because of his homosexuality. Years later, he fled Cuba for New York, where he lived until his death from AIDS in 1990.
*
Borrego, who got to know Marks at La Cabaña, described him as a strange, aloof man, who was “sadistic” and who liked to participate in the firing squads. He was about forty years old, spoke little Spanish, and was rumored to be on the run from U.S. justice. After several months, he disappeared from Cuba.
*
In late January, Fidel had gone to Venezuela to thank the outgoing Larrazábal regime, which had sent him arms during the war. While there, he made remarks that were interpreted as an implicit threat toward Nicaragua’s dictator, Anastasio Somoza. He also met with the president-elect of Venezuela, Rómulo Betancourt—the politician Che had so distrusted upon meeting him in Costa Rica. As Betancourt would later reveal, Fidel asked if he could count on Venezuela to supply Cuba with oil, since he was planning “a game with the Americans.” The solidly pro-American Betancourt told Fidel curtly that he could buy oil like any other customer, cash on the barrelhead.
*
Upon his return to Buenos Aires, Masetti had published
Los Que Luchany los Que Lloran
(Those Who Fight and Those Who Cry), about his time in the Sierra Maestra, lauding the Cuban revolution and its leaders.
*
Much has been made by historians of Fidel’s pacifying remarks, carrying the suggestion that the Eisenhower administration “lost” Cuba by treating him insensitively; but subsequent events bolster the theory that Fidel was simply saying what his audience wanted to hear.
*
Back in Havana a month after the visit, López Fresquet was contacted by an American official with a message from “Mr. Bender” for Fidel. “I gave Castro the intelligence,” López Fresquet recalled. “He didn’t answer me, and he never gave me any information to pass on to Mr. Bender.” In any event, within a year, the Urrutia government would be consigned to history, overtaken by Fidel and his radical comrades, and López Fresquet, the would-be liaison, would resign his post and go into exile.
*
A credible-sounding alternative version of Leonov’s story was offered by Anastas Mikoyan’s son, Sergo, who accompanied his father and Leonov on the trip to Cuba. In 1994, Sergo Mikoyan told me that he had known Leonov for years before the trip. They were about the same age and had gone to school together. To Mikoyan’s knowledge, Leonov was sent to Mexico in the mid-1950s by the KGB. His cover was that he was working for an official Soviet publishing house. Leonov was assigned to Mexico at the same time another friend of Mikoyan’s went in a similar capacity to the United States. That friend, Mikoyan said, “was certainly KGB.” Leonov’s first contact with Raúl Castro
was
casual, Mikoyan agreed, but his subsequent meetings in Mexico were intentional. “Ironically, he was told by the KGB to halt these contacts.” Mikoyan’s belief is that this order was due to pressure from the Cuban Communists, who still didn’t approve of Fidel Castro, believing him and his movement to be “bourgeois and putschist.”
*
The truth of what happened to Camilo Cienfuegos may never be known, but it is clear that Che never suspected Fidel of having anything to do with his disappearance. Che had a deep affection for Camilo; not only did he name his firstborn son after him, but the only picture hanging on the wall of his private study was a portrait of Camilo. If Che had suspected Fidel of complicity in Camilo’s death, it seems highly improbable that he would have remained loyally at his side.
*
The ministers who sided with Pazos in the Matos affair were unceremoniously fired. They were Justo Carrillo, Manuel Ray, and Che’s old antagonist Faustino Pérez. Camilo Cienfuegos’s brother Osmany, a longtime PSP member, replaced Ray, and a brother-in-law of Raúl’s wife, Vílma Espín, took over Faustino’s job. Pazos, Carrillo, and Ray eventually left Cuba, but Faustino Pérez stayed on and soon regained Fidel’s favor.
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See Notes for more history of the photograph.
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On November 24, while he was in Beijing, Aleida had given birth to a baby girl that she named after herself.
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Despite the large-scale expropriations, much of Cuba’s cultivated land remained in the hands of small farmers, who continued to till their plots without hindrance from the state. In 1963, a new bill reduced the size of private landholdings still further, but the revolution never completely eradicated its fiercely independent
guajiro
farmers.
*
By 1960, according to Evan Thomas, the author of
The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared—The Early Years of the CIA
, the agency had come up with James Bondish code names for its intended targets: Fidel was
AMTHUG
; Che, a doctor, was
AMQUACK
.
*
See Notes.
*
See Notes.
*
Unlike all the other Cuban-sponsored guerrilla groups in Latin America, the FSLN went on to seize power, overthrowing the last dictator of the Somoza clan, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, in 1979. Carlos Fonseca did not live to see Nicaragua’s “liberation,” however. He was killed in the fighting in 1976.
*
Che also saw the flight as an opportunity to get his brother Juan Martín to Cuba. According to María Elena, Juan Martín’s wife at the time, he was prepared to go, but there were some last-minute difficulties. In the end, Juan Martín never did return to Cuba while his brother was alive; nor did Che’s father or anyone else in the family, except Che’s mother.
*
Neither Che, Masetti, nor Cooke would live to see the day, but the forces they helped set in motion eventually brought about a period of revolutionary violence and vicious counterrepression by the military that would drastically alter the political landscape of modern Argentina in the years to come.