Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Herbert Matthews—the senior correspondent for
The New York Times
and a press veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Mussolini’s Abyssinian campaign, and World War II—arrived in camp early on the morning of February 17. Che wasn’t present for Matthews’s three-hour interview with Fidel, but Fidel briefed him afterward, and in his diary Che noted the points of most significance to him. Fidel had complained about the military aid lent to Batista by the United States, and, when Matthews had asked if he was anti-imperialist, Fidel had responded carefully that he was if this meant a desire to rid his country of its economic chains. This did not imply, Fidel hastened to add, that he felt hatred for the United States or its people. “The gringo,” Fidel told Che, “had shown friendliness and didn’t ask any trick questions.”
Fidel had engaged in a little trickery of his own, however, by arranging for a fighter to burst in sweatily, bearing “a message from the Second Column.” Fidel hoped to make Matthews believe he had a sizable number of fighters, when in fact his rebel army at this point numbered fewer than twenty armed men. When the interview was over, Matthews was driven back to Manzanillo, where he would go on to Santiago, fly to Havana, and board another plane for New York; he knew he had a major scoop on his hands and wanted to publish it as quickly as possible.
“The gringo left early,” Che wrote in his diary. “And I was on guard when they came to tell me to redouble the vigilance because Eutimio was at Epifanio’s house.” Juan Almeida led a patrol to seize Eutimio, who, unaware that his treason had been discovered, was taken prisoner, disarmed, and brought before Fidel. By now, an army safe-conduct pass bearing Eutimio’s name and proving his collaboration with the enemy had fallen into the rebels’ hands. Fidel showed it to him.
“Eutimio got down on his knees, asking that he be shot to have it over with,” Che wrote. “Fidel tried to trick him, making him believe he would pardon him, but Eutimio remembered the scene with Chicho Osorio and didn’t allow himself to be deceived. Then Fidel announced he would be executed and Ciro Frías inflicted a heartfelt sermon on him in the tone of an old friend. The man awaited death in silence and a certain dignity. A tremendous downpour began and everything turned black.”
Precisely what happened next remained a carefully guarded Cuban state secret for decades. None of the eyewitnesses to Eutimio Guerra’s execution—the first traitor executed by the Cuban rebels—has ever said publicly who fired the fatal shot. It is easy to see why. The answer is to be found in Che’s private diary, in a passage that is unlikely ever to be officially published.
“The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for [Eutimio],” Che wrote, “so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 [-caliber] pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe]. He gasped a little while and was dead. Upon proceeding to remove his belongings I couldn’t get off the watch that was tied by a chain to his belt, and then he told me in a steady voice farther away than fear: ‘Yank it off, boy, what does it matter. ...’ I did so and his possessions were now mine. We slept badly, wet and I with something of asthma.”
Che’s narrative is as chilling as it is revealing about his personality. His matter-of-factness in describing the execution, his scientific notations on the bullet’s entry and exit wounds, suggest a remarkable detachment from violence. To Che, the decision to execute Eutimio himself was, in his own words, simply a way to end an uncomfortable situation. As for his recollection of Eutimo’s posthumous last words, it is simply inexplicable and lends a surreal dimension to the grim scene.
It is also in stark contrast to Che’s published account of the event. In the chapter “Death of a Traitor” in
Pasajes
, he rendered the scene with literary aplomb and turned it into a dark revolutionary parable about redemption through sacrifice. Describing the moment when Eutimio fell on his knees in front of Fidel, he wrote: “At that moment he seemed to have aged; on his temple were a good many gray hairs we had never noticed before.”
Of Ciro’s “lecture,” in which he upbraided Eutimio for causing the deaths and suffering of many of their friends and neighbors, Che wrote: “It was a long and moving speech, which Eutimio listened to in silence, his head bent. We asked him if he wanted anything and he answered yes, that he wanted the Revolution, or rather us, to take care of his children.” The revolution had kept its promise to Eutimio, Che wrote, but his name had “already been forgotten, perhaps even by his children,” who bore new names and were attending Cuba’s state schools, receiving the same treatment as other children and preparing themselves for a better life.
“But one day,” he added, “they will have to know that their father was executed by the revolutionary power because of his treachery. It is also just that they be told how their father—a peasant who had allowed himself to be tempted by corruption and had tried to commit a grave crime, moved by the desire for glory and wealth—had nevertheless recognized his error, and had not even hinted at a desire for clemency, which he knew he did not deserve. Finally, they should also know that in his last moments he remembered his children and asked that they be treated well.”
Che completed his parable with a description of the final moment of Eutimio’s life that was heavily imbued with religious symbolism. “Just then a heavy storm broke and the sky darkened; in the midst of a deluge, the sky crossed by lightning and the noise of thunder, as one of these strokes of lightning burst and was closely followed by a thunderbolt, Eutimio Guerra’s life was ended and even those comrades standing near him did not hear the shot.”
This incident was seminal in the growth of Che’s mystique among the guerrillas and the peasants of the Sierra Maestra. He had acquired a reputation for a cold-blooded willingness to take direct action against transgressors of the revolutionary code. In fact, according to Cuban sources who prefer anonymity, Che stepped forward to kill Eutimio only when it had become clear that nobody else wanted to take the initiative. Presumably, this included Fidel, who, having given the order for Eutimio’s death without selecting someone to carry it out, simply moved away to shelter himself from the rain.
One of the
guajiros
wanted to place a wooden cross on Eutimio’s grave, but Che forbade it on the grounds that it could compromise the family on whose land they were camped. Instead, a cross was carved into a nearby tree.
If Che was bothered by the execution, there seemed little sign of it by the next day. In his journal, commenting on the arrival of a pretty July 26 activist at the farm, he wrote: “[She is a] great admirer of the Movement who seems to me to want to fuck more than anything else.”
On February 18, the summit meeting of the July 26 leaders was over and Fidel spent the morning writing a manifesto for his urban comrades to take with them and disseminate throughout the island. Fidel’s “Appeal to the Cuban People” contained combative language close to Che’s heart, and he applauded it in his diary as “really revolutionary.”
The manifesto led off with a brief account of the war, delivered in rhetoric that was suitably overblown for the occasion. Not only had the rebels not been exterminated, he said; they had “bravely resisted” the modern weapons and vastly superior forces of the enemy in eighty days of fighting, and their ranks had been “steadily reinforced by the peasants of the Sierra Maestra.”
Fidel ended with a six-point “guideline to the country,” calling for stepped-up economic sabotage against the sugar harvest, public utilities, transportation, and communications systems; and for “the summary and immediate executions of the henchmen who torture and kill revolutionaries, the regime’s politicians whose stubbornness and inflexibility have brought the country to this situation, and all those who stand in the way of the Movement’s success.” He also called for the organization of a “civic resistance” throughout Cuba; an increase in money-raising efforts “to cover the rising costs of the Movement,” and a “general revolutionary strike” to bring the struggle against Batista to a climax.
Defending his decree to burn sugarcane, Fidel wrote: “To those who invoke the workers’ livelihoods to combat this measure, we ask: Why don’t they defend the workers when ... they suck dry their salaries, when they swindle their retirement pensions, when they pay them in bonds and they kill them from hunger during eight months?
*
Why are we spilling our blood if not for the poor of Cuba? What does a little hunger today matter if we can win the bread and liberty of tomorrow?”
Fidel’s manifesto was based on more than a little deception. Just as he had tricked Herbert Matthews into believing he had many more troops than he did, he now declared that his army’s ranks were “steadily increasing” because of “peasant support.” That support was largely fictitious at this point. Other than Crescencio’s loyalty, which Che still had doubts about in those days, the rebels’ peasant support was still very tenuous. The rebel band had nearly been annihilated through the betrayal of a peasant, Eutimio Guerra. Many more peasants had heeded the army’s advice and fled the sierra after
the attack on La Plata. Although there were some notable exceptions, many of the peasants whom the rebels relied on, either as paid smugglers or as providers of food and other supplies, had their own self-interest at heart. Certainly Fidel’s continuing practice of passing himself off as a
guardia
with unfamiliar peasants showed that he was well aware of the precarious nature of his hold on them.
Heading back into the mountains from the Díaz farm, Fidel confronted a peasant who had been detained. He told the man that he and his men were
guardias rurales
looking for information about the “revolutionaries.” The frightened man denied all knowledge of the rebels, and when Fidel insisted, he promised that if he saw anyone suspicious he would report them to the nearest garrison. As Che rendered it in his diary, “Fidel [finally] told him we were revolutionaries and that we defended the poor man’s cause, but since he had shown willingness to help the
guardia
he would be hanged. The reaction of the man, Pedro Ponce, was extraordinary, he arose sweating and trembling. ‘No, how can it be, come to my house to eat chicken with rice.’ After a philippic from Fidel complaining about the lack of help from the peasants we took him up on his offer of food.”
This episode was left out of Che’s published accounts of the war, no doubt because it showed that Fidel sometimes took his penchant for deception a little too far. Still, Fidel was probably wise to take such precautions. Some
guajiros
proved sympathetic without prodding, but to many more the rebels were a nettlesome presence that had brought death and destruction to the Sierra Maestra. The army was still the preponderant force. It controlled the towns and roads and it could win over individuals, as it had done with Eutimio Guerra, through a combination of material incentives and terror. Until Fidel became the dominant military force, he would have to use trickery, bribery, and selective terror to neutralize potential traitors or spies.
It was now common knowledge among the
guajiros
that whoever helped the rebels would be likely to suffer for it. Civilians were caught in a vicious trap between the army’s brutality on the one hand and the rebels’ reprisals against informers on the other. By executing Eutimio Guerra, Che had come to the fore of the rebel army’s new policy of “swift revolutionary justice.”
A new incident underscored that on February 18. Just as the members of the Directorate were preparing to leave the Díaz farm, a pistol shot rang out nearby and everyone grabbed weapons. But it was a false alarm. Che recorded, “Right away we heard a shout of ‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing,’ and El Gallego Morán appeared, wounded by a .45 bullet in one leg. ... I gave him emergency treatment, dosing him with penicillin, and left the leg
stretched out with a splint. ... Fidel and Raúl accused him of doing it on purpose. I’m not sure of one thing or the other.” Once again, firm evidence of Morán’s true motivations eluded them, but the timing of his “accident,” coming only a day after Eutimio’s execution and just prior to the departure of their last visitors—permitting him to be evacuated from the field—made it look suspicious.
Morán knew that “desertion, insubordination, and defeatism” were capital offenses, and he was openly suspected of wanting to desert. Che was his likely nemesis, observing him constantly, and just days earlier had argued for his execution. Morán must have thought his days were numbered, and he was probably right.
Later on, Che wrote an epitaph for Morán, who defected to the Batista forces. “Morán’s subsequent history, his treachery and his death at the hands of revolutionaries in Guantánamo, seems to establish that he [
had
] shot himself intentionally.” This brief conclusion to his narrative about Morán resembles many of his portraits of men who took part in the war; conscious of his role as an architect of Cuba’s new official history, Che gave each individual symbolic significance as a representative of values to be cherished or vilified in the “new” Cuba. Eutimio Guerra was a peasant whose soul had been corrupted, whose name had become synonymous with treachery, and whose errors should never be repeated. By contrast, the
guajiro
Julio Zenon Acosta became in his prose a revolutionary martyr, an exemplary archetype for workers and peasants to imitate. El Gallego Morán was a deserter, and then a traitor, and that he eventually paid the ultimate price for his treachery was a fate Che endorsed for enemies of the revolution. Its formal enemies were the army troops and the secret police, to be sure, but as great a danger was posed by the enemy
within
. Che had embraced revolution as the ultimate embodiment of history’s lessons and the correct path to the future. Now, convinced he was right, he looked around with an inquisitor’s eye for those who might endanger its survival.
As they moved off into the hills, having decided to stay in the vicinity to await the promised arrival of Frank País’s volunteers on March 5, Che’s asthma returned, bringing on what he later called “for me personally the most bitter days of the war.” Che would periodically succumb to debilitating bouts of his chronic condition, leading sturdier comrades to marvel at his willpower as he struggled to keep up on their marathon marches. But many would also have to help Che, at times to physically carry him, when his asthma left him incapacitated. It was ironic that a severe asthmatic such
as Che should have ended up in humid, subtropical Cuba, a country with a disproportionately high per capita asthma rate, possibly the highest of any country in the Western Hemisphere.