Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
The incapacitated Ramiro was left at the home of a friendly peasant, with a pistol to defend himself, and the rest of the men headed off for La Plata. Guillermo García had shown up with some new peasant recruits—the rebel “army” had now swelled to thirty-two men—but they were still short of arms, with only twenty-three weapons and a few sticks of dynamite and hand grenades among them. They hiked into the night, their path laid out for them by a collaborator who had cut marks into the trees with a machete, and escorted by Eutimio Guerra, a well-known local
precarista
leader who had volunteered himself and a neighbor to be their guides.
On January 15, with a hostage in tow—a local teenager they had found collecting honey and decided to keep with them in case he was tempted to spread the alarm—the rebels reached a point overlooking the mouth of the Río de la Plata, about half a mile away from the army encampment. Using
their telescopic sights, they could see the target, a half-built barracks sitting in the middle of a clearing between the riverbank and the beach. A group of casually uniformed men were doing domestic chores. Just beyond lay the home of one of the
mayorales
they had vowed to execute. At dusk a coast guard patrol boat loaded with soldiers appeared and apparently signaled to the men on shore. Uncertain what this meant, the rebels decided to stay hidden and delay their attack until the following day.
At dawn on January 16, they posted lookouts to observe the barracks. The patrol boat had vanished and no soldiers could be seen. This unnerved them, but by mid-afternoon they decided to make their approach. The whole group forded the river and took up positions alongside the trail leading to the barracks. A little after nightfall, two men and two boys appeared on the trail, and the rebels seized them. One was a suspected
chivato
. To extract information, he was “squeezed a little,” as Che worded it euphemistically in his diary. The man told them that there were ten soldiers in the barracks and that Chicho Osorio, one of the most notorious of the three
mayorales
on their hit list, was headed in their direction and could be expected any minute.
Osorio appeared, mounted on a mule and escorted by a young black boy on foot. The rebels decided to trick him, and shouted out, “Halt, the rural guard!” Osorio shouted back, “Mosquito!”—the soldiers’ code word—and then his name. The rebels moved in, confiscating Osorio’s revolver and a knife found on the boy before leading them over to where Fidel waited.
What happened next has become Cuban revolutionary folklore. As Che told it later in his published account of the episode, “[Fidel] made him think he was a colonel of the
guardia rural
who was investigating some irregularities. Osorio, who was drunk, then gave an account of all the enemies of the regime who in his words ‘should have their balls cut off.’ There was the confirmation of who were our friends and who weren’t.” With each word he spoke, the unsuspecting Osorio dug his own grave a little deeper. “Colonel” Fidel asked him what he knew about Eutimio Guerra, their guide, and Osorio replied that it was known that Guerra had hidden Fidel Castro. In fact, Osorio said, he had been looking for Guerra, and if he found him, he would kill him. Giving the inebriated
mayoral
even more rope, Fidel opined that if “Fidel” were found, he should also be killed. Osorio agreed enthusiastically and added that Crescencio Pérez too should die. Really into his stride now, Osorio went on to brag about men he had killed and mis-treated and, as evidence of his prowess, pointed to his feet. “‘Look,’ he said,” Che wrote afterward, “pointing to the Mexican-made boots he wore (and which we wore also), ‘I got them off one of those sons ... [of whores] we killed.’ There, without knowing it, Chicho Osorio had signed his own death sentence.”
Then, either so drunk or so naive as to believe that Fidel was indeed a
guardia
officer, and anxious to win his favor, Osorio offered to guide them to the barracks to point out the weakness in its security defenses, and even allowed himself to be tied up as a mock prisoner to play his role in the “inspector’s” charade. As they advanced on the barracks, Osorio explained where the sentry stood watch and where the guards slept. One of the rebels was sent ahead to check and returned to report that Osorio’s information was accurate. The rebels finally made ready for the attack, leaving Osorio behind in the custody of two men. “Their orders were to kill him the minute the shooting started,” Che wrote matter-of-factly, “something they obeyed with strictness.”
It was now 2:40 in the morning. The rebels fanned out into three groups. Their targets were the zinc-roofed barracks and the rustic house next to it, which was owned by the second of their targeted
mayorales
. When they were about 130 feet away, Fidel fired two bursts from his machine gun. Then all the others opened fire. They shouted for the soldiers to surrender but were answered with gunfire. Che and a comrade from the
Granma
, Luis Crespo, threw their grenades, but neither exploded. Raúl threw a burning stick of dynamite, but nothing happened then either. Fidel ordered them to set fire to the overseer’s house. Two initial attempts were repelled by gunfire, but a third try by Che and Crespo was successful, except that it was not the overseer’s house but a storehouse next to it, full of coconuts, that caught fire.
The soldiers inside the barracks, evidently fearing they were going to be burned alive, began fleeing. One practically ran into Crespo, who shot him in the chest. Che fired at another man and, although it was dark, believed he had hit him. Bullets flew back and forth for a few minutes, and then the firefight abated. The soldiers in the barracks surrendered, and an inspection of the overseer’s house showed it to be full of wounded men. The fight was over. Che took a tally in his diary: “The result of the combat was 8 Springfields, one machine gun and about a thousand rounds [captured]. We had spent approximately 500 [rounds]. Also [we got] cartridge belts, helmets, canned food, knives, clothes and even rum.”
The
guardia
had been hit badly, and the barracks had been so riddled with bullets it looked like “a sieve.” Two soldiers lay dead and five were wounded, three mortally. Three others were taken prisoner. There were no rebel casualties. Before they withdrew, they set the buildings on fire. Che personally set fire to the house of the overseer, who, along with the barracks’ commander, a sergeant, had managed to escape.
Back in the hills, the rebels freed their prisoners and their civilian hostages, after issuing a warning to the suspected
chivato
. Overriding Che’s
opposition, Fidel gave all their medicine to the soldiers to treat the wounded men who remained in the ravaged clearing below. The rebels’ enthusiasm was dampened slightly when realized that their first hostage, the teenage boy, had run away during the fracas, along with a scout. Worse, they had taken with them two weapons—a shotgun and the late Chicho Osorio’s confiscated revolver.
It was still only 4:30
A.M.
Taking advantage of the remaining darkness, they fled east toward Palma Mocha, a farming community named for the river entering the sea about two miles away. They arrived in time to witness what Che described as a “pitiful spectacle”—families fleeing with their belongings after being warned that the air force was going to bomb the area. “The maneuver was obvious,” Che wrote in his diary. “To evict all the peasants and later the [Nuñez-Beattie] company would take over the abandoned lands.”
Having seen firsthand the fallout from their action, the rebels moved on, looking for a place to ambush the soldiers they knew would be coming in after them. The men were keyed up and tired when, at a pit stop in the march, Fidel ordered a review of their ammunition. Each man was supposed to have forty rounds. When Sergio Acuña, one of the new
guajiro
recruits, was found with 100 rounds, Fidel asked him to give up the excess, and he refused. Fidel ordered him arrested, and Acuña cocked his rifle threateningly. The incident was defused when Raúl and Crescencio persuaded Acuña to hand over his weapon and ammunition, telling him that his in-fraction would be ignored if he made a “formal request” to stay with the rebels. Che was displeased with this solution but wrote in his journal, “Fidel agreed, creating a really negative antecedent that would later rear its head, because Acuña was seen to have gotten away with imposing his will.”
The rebels marched on and reached a peasant’s home in a clearing, surrounded by a forested rise of land on three sides, and near a creek that Che christened “Arroyo del Infierno” (Hell’s Creek). The site offered both water and an escape route, and was a perfect place to lay an ambush. As they arrived, the owner was preparing to join the exodus to the coast, leaving the place to the rebels, and over the next few days they organized themselves, setting out an ambush position in the forest with good views of the house and the dirt track leading into the clearing.
The men were jumpy, though, and one morning as he and Fidel inspected the fighters’ position, Che was almost shot when a fighter saw him coming from a distance and fired off a round at him. It was partly Che’s fault. He was wearing an army corporal’s cap he had taken as a trophy at La Plata. Even more alarming was the reaction of the other rebels, who, instead of scrambling into defensive positions at the sound of the gunshot,
immediately ran off into the bush. In his later published account, Che told of being shot at but omitted any mention of the men’s running away. Instead, he used the anecdote as a parable to exalt the condition of men at war. “This incident was symptomatic of the state of high tensions that prevailed as we waited for the relief the battle would bring. At such times, even those with nerves of steel feel a certain trembling in the knees and each man longs for the arrival of that luminous moment of battle.”
All was quiet for a few more days. Fidel ordered provisions from some of the few peasants who had remained in the area, and he repaid a farmer who showed up looking for a lost pig, one that Fidel had shot for food on their first day in camp. They began hearing rumors that the army was inflicting reprisals on local peasants for the La Plata attack. Their new guide, Eutimio Guerra, took off for his home, carrying some messages for Fidel and orders to find out about the army’s movements. The rebels anxiously listened to their radio, but no news of the army’s activity was broadcast.
Before dawn on January 22, they heard gunshots in the distance and they readied themselves for battle, but the morning dragged by and no soldiers appeared. Then, at noon, a figure appeared in the clearing. Calixto García, seated next to Che, spotted him first. They looked through their telescopic sights. It was a soldier. As they watched, a total of nine figures came into view and gathered around the huts. Then the shooting began. Che recorded it in his field diary: “Fidel opened fire and the man fell immediately shouting ‘
Ay mi madre
’; his two companions fell immediately [as well]. All of a sudden I realized there was a soldier hidden in the second house barely twenty meters from my position; I could see only his feet so I fired in his direction. At the second shot he fell. Luis [Crespo] brought me a grenade sent by Fidel because they had told him there were more people in the house. Luis covered me and I entered but fortunately there was nothing else.”
Che recovered the rifle and cartridge belt of the soldier he had hit, then inspected the body. “He had a bullet under the heart with exit on the right side, he was dead.” To his certain knowledge, Che had killed his first man.
While Che was proving himself in combat, Hilda and the baby were visiting with the Guevara family in Argentina. On New Year’s, Ernesto senior had called Hilda with the news of his son’s first message and sent her a ticket to fly to Buenos Aires. On January 6, after three weeks at home with her own family in Lima, she flew to Buenos Aires with the baby to meet her in-laws for the first time. They bombarded her with questions. Why had their Ernesto
gone into harm’s way for a foreign cause? Who was Fidel Castro, anyway? It was quickly apparent to Hilda that Ernesto, or “Ernestito” as his aunts still called him, was the family’s favorite son. “Because of their deep affection for Ernesto,” she wrote, “his parents found it hard to adjust to the idea of his being in danger. They kept coming back to the feeling that it would be better if he were in Argentina.” She did her best to explain what she knew of Ernesto’s political evolution, but she was merely repeating things he had already told them in his letters, which they had obvious difficulty in accepting. Celia was most in need of reassurance. “I told Doña Celia, my mother-in-law, of the deep tenderness that Ernesto felt for her,” Hilda wrote. “This was not exaggeration for the sake of comforting her. I knew what she meant to him.”
Hilda and the baby stayed a month with the Guevaras. When they returned to Lima she found a letter from Ernesto waiting for her. It was dated January 28, 1957. “
Querida vieja:
Here in the Cuban jungle, alive and thirsting for blood, I’m writing these inflamed, Martí-inspired lines. As if I really were a soldier (I’m dirty and ragged at least), I am writing this letter over a tin plate with a gun at my side and something new, a cigar in my mouth.” In the same boasting, hearty tone, he breezily recapped everything that had happened since the
Granma
’s “now famous” landing, emphasizing the dangers faced and hardships overcome: “Our misfortunes continued. ... [W]e were surprised in the also now famous Alegría, and scattered like pigeons. ... I was wounded in the neck, and I’m still alive only due to my cat’s lives. ... [F]or a few days I walked through those hills thinking I was seriously wounded ... we got reorganized and rearmed and attacked a troop barracks, killing five soldiers. ... [They] sent select troops after us. We fought these off and this time it cost them three dead and two wounded. ... Soon after we captured three guards and took their guns.
“Add to all this the fact that we had no losses and that the mountains are ours and you’ll get an idea of the demoralization of the enemy. We slip through their hands like soap just when they think they have us trapped. Naturally the fight isn’t all won, there’ll be many more battles. But so far it’s going our way, and each time will do so more.”