Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
It is hard to escape the sense that Che’s deeply felt desire to rid himself of his “I” and to become part of a group derived from the inherent isolation imposed by his asthma. Happily for him, he had found that fraternity he sought. He no longer had to endure it alone. Indeed, in the Sierra Maestra, there were times when he was completely helpless, and his dependence on the support of his comrades became quite literally a matter of life or death. But no one suffered alone in the guerrilla community. One day, it was Che who needed help; it would be another man’s turn the next day. Quite possibly, it was this sense of sharing, more than any other factor, that gave rise to his intense personal reverence for the ethos of guerrilla life.
On February 25—“a day of water and bombs,” as he termed it—Che and his comrades awoke to the sound of mortar blasts and machine-gun and rifle fire that gradually drew nearer to them. Suspecting that the army was combing the area, they moved camp after dark, but they were in bad shape. Their food was practically finished and they were surviving on chocolate and condensed milk. Che had felt the stirrings of a “dangerous asthma attack” for several days and it now struck him with full force, worsening to the point where sleep was impossible. Then, after a peasant collaborator fed them pork, which made most of them ill, Che was weakened still further by two days of vomiting. Following a rain-sodden march, his wheezing became constant. They were in a zone where the peasants wanted nothing to do with them, they were out of food, and their latest guide had abruptly disappeared. Fidel ordered the men to withdraw into the hills, but by now Che was so weak that he could no longer walk. As the others waited, he injected one of the last two adrenaline ampoules he had with him, and it gave him just enough strength to get back on his feet.
Reaching the crest of a hill, they spotted a column of enemy troops climbing up to occupy the ridge, and they broke into a run to get there first. When a mortar shell exploded, the rebels realized the soldiers were on to them; as Che later acknowledged, he almost didn’t make it. “I couldn’t keep up the pace of the march, and I was constantly lagging behind.” His faithful sidekick, Luis Crespo, helped Che by alternately carrying him and his backpack, and threatening to hit him with his rifle butt, calling him an “Argentine son of a whore.”
They escaped the troops, but Che was drenched in another heavy rain and, barely able to breathe, had to be carried the final part of their trek. They found sanctuary in a place appropriately called Purgatorio, where Fidel reached a decision. He paid a peasant to make a quick trip to Manzanillo
for asthma medicine and left Che with a
guajiro
escort. He and the others went on. The plan was that as soon as Che was better, he should return to the Díaz farm to meet the new rebel volunteers and then lead them into the sierra and rejoin Fidel.
The man delegated to remain behind with Che was called El Maestro (the Teacher), a recent volunteer who claimed falsely to be a Moncada veteran but whom they had accepted into their ranks anyway. As Che described him later, he was “a man of doubtful repute but great strength.” After Fidel’s departure, he and El Maestro concealed themselves in the forest to await the return of the peasant with the medicine. They spent two days of “hope and fear” there. Che’s asthma rose and abated and kept him from sleeping. They could hear the machine guns and mortars of the army troops that were searching for them. The courier arrived with a bottle of asthma medicine, but it only partially relieved Che’s symptoms. That night he still couldn’t walk. On March 3, he made a supreme effort to get moving, but it took him five hours to climb a hill that normally would have taken one. He wrote that it had been a “day marked by a spiritual victory and a corporeal defeat.”
It took Che a week to reach the Díaz farm. He was five days late. He had received little help from El Maestro and still less from local peasants. A normally friendly peasant farmer became so nervous upon seeing him that, Che wrote witheringly, “His fear is such that it looks like it might break
shitometers
.”
It didn’t matter much that Che was late, since the new troops hadn’t arrived yet. But Epifanio Díaz had news for him, and it wasn’t good. A few days earlier, Fidel’s column had been surprised by enemy troops at a place called Los Altos de Merino and had split into two groups. There was no word of Fidel’s fate.
In one of the many ironies that would mark the Cuban revolution, the most desperate days of the rebel band in the Sierra Maestra coincided with one of the most devastating blows to the Batista regime. In late February, the news of Fidel’s defiant interview with Herbert Matthews had hit Cuba like a bombshell. “The interview of Matthews with Fidel has surpassed all expectations,” Che noted euphorically. Batista’s defense minister denounced Matthews’s article as a hoax and challenged him to produce a photograph of himself and Fidel, but this would quickly turn out to be only one of the public relations blunders made by the government.
The first part of Matthew’s three-part series was published in
The New York Times
on February 24. Batista lifted press censorship the
following day, and the article was immediately translated and reprinted in newspapers, sparking comments and debate on the airwaves throughout Cuba. The interview proved that Fidel was still alive and well, despite the government’s claims to the contrary, and was powerful in terms of international publicity. Matthews sympathized with Fidel’s cause. “Fidel Castro, the rebel leader of Cuba’s youth,” he wrote, “is alive and fighting hard and successfully in the rugged, almost impenetrable vastness of the Sierra Maestra, at the southern tip of the island. ... [T]housands of men and women are heart and soul with Fidel Castro and the new deal for which they think he stands. ... Hundreds of highly respected citizens are helping Señor Castro ... [and] a fierce Government counterterrorism [policy] has aroused the people even more against General Batista. ... From the look of things, General Batista cannot possibly hope to suppress the Castro revolt.”
Matthews portrayed an admirable and virile figure, and he had been taken in by Fidel’s deceptions as to the real size of his force: “This was quite a man—a powerful six-footer, olive-skinned, full-faced, with a straggly beard. He was dressed in an olive-gray fatigue uniform and carried a rifle with a telescopic sight, of which he was very proud. It seems his men have something more than fifty of these and he said the soldiers feared them. ‘We can pick them off at a thousand yards with these guns,’ he said. ... The personality of the man is overpowering. It was easy to see that his men adored him and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the youth of Cuba all over the island. Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership.”
Matthews’s description of Fidel’s politics made him sound almost like a follower of FDR: “It is a revolutionary movement that calls itself socialistic. It is also nationalistic, which generally in Latin America means anti-Yankee. The program is vague and couched in generalities, but it amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist. The real core of its strength is that it is fighting against the military dictatorship of President Batista. ... [Castro] has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution, to hold elections.”
The media battle, which continued to rage over the next few days, was followed with relish by the rebels on their radio. It reached a head on February 28 when
The New York Times
published a photo of Matthews with Fidel, dramatically crushing the regime’s incautious claims that the journalist had dreamed up the entire encounter. Further boasts by the Oriente military commander that “the zone where the imaginary interview took place is physically impossible to enter” merely lent weight to Fidel’s claims of being invincible and impossible to catch.
On the heels of Fidel’s interview, however, came the bad news that Frank País and Armando Hart had been arrested. Then, on March 13, as Che awaited the new rebel volunteers at the Díaz farm, radio reports began broadcasting the first details of an attempt on Batista’s life in Havana. Armed groups belonging to the Directorio Revolucíonario led by José Antonio Echeverría, together with some of Carlos Prío’s
auténticos
, had launched an audacious daylight assault on the presidential palace and temporarily seized the twenty-four-hour Radio Reloj station in Havana. But the assaults failed, and in the shoot-outs that ensued, at least forty people had died. The dead included Echeverría and more than thirty of his followers, five palace guards, and an American tourist who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Batista himself, who was, ironically, reading a book about Lincoln’s assassination when the attack came, survived unscathed.
In his private notes Che routinely referred to the Directorio as
“el grupo terrorista.”
Fidel and Echeverría may have signed a pact in Mexico City, but in reality the two leaders were bitter rivals. The failed assassination attempt left little doubt that Echeverría had hoped to deliver a fait accompli in Havana, displacing Fidel and his Movement in the struggle for power. With the death of its leader, the Directorio had suffered a heavy blow, but, as events would prove, it was not yet eliminated from the scene; it would continue to pose challenges to Fidel’s hegemony right up to the end. For now, the July 26 cells in Havana came to the rescue, helping to tend the wounded and hide men in their own safe houses, and, opportunistically, taking possession of a Directorio weapons cache.
For Batista, the attempt on his life brought some short-term positive results. The conservative business community rallied around him, and he came out of the affair looking strong and in control, a caudillo who offered the last line of defense between traditional Cuban society and anarchy. In succeeding days the police carried out numerous arrests and gunned down several fugitive survivors of the assault. They murdered Pelayo Cuervo Navarro, a prominent former senator and the acting Ortodoxo Party leader, whom they suspected of having links to the assassination attempt.
In spite of a few mishaps, fifty recruits from Santiago and a handful of new weapons arrived at the Díaz farm on March 17. Che’s biggest problem was to find sufficient food to feed so many men, and then to move them through the hills to rejoin Fidel at their previously arranged rendezvous, a spot not far from Los Altos de Espinosa. As they marched out, Che observed that the new troops from Santiago had all of the same flaws the men from the
Granma
had at the beginning—little sense of military discipline and less physical endurance. They complained about the food, and some could barely make it up the first hill they climbed. Once they
had scaled it, Che let them rest for an entire day to recuperate from what for them, as he ironically put it in his diary, “had been the greatest achievement of the revolution so far.”
Sending for some
guajiros
to come and help, Che began slowly moving the new men into the sierra, and after eight days of painful hiking they met up with Fidel and the others—who had, after all, survived the recent ambush. For the moment they were safe; Che had accomplished his mission, and the Rebel Army was no longer only eighteen men, but now seventy.
After a weeklong climb into the Sierra Maestra with his army of blistered, complaining greenhorns, Che rejoined Fidel at the remote hillside community of La Derecha. Once again Che was scolded, this time for not having sufficiently imposed his authority over Jorge Sotús, the leader of the new volunteers. The newcomer’s arrogance had irritated Che and brought angry protests from many of his men en route, but Che had limited himself to giving Sotús a sermon about the need for discipline, evidently preferring to let Fidel deal with him.
As Fidel saw it, Che had not taken command, and his displeasure was reflected in a reorganization of the general staff. He handed out promotions and divided the troops into three expanded platoons led by Raúl, Juan Almeida, and Jorge Sotús. Che was confirmed in his humble capacity as general-staff doctor. In his diary, Che noted, “Raúl tried to argue that I be made political commissar as well, but Fidel was opposed.”
This incident, which went unmentioned in Che’s published accounts of the war, reveals not only Raúl’s regard for Che but Fidel’s political acumen. Batista was already accusing Fidel of being a Communist, a charge Fidel was vigorously denying, and to appoint an unabashed Marxist such as Che as his political commissar would have played into Batista’s hands and alienated many of the July 26 rank and file, who were overwhelmingly anticommunist.
Fidel then held a conclave with his eight top men, including Che, to decide on their immediate war plans. Che argued that they should immediately engage the army, to give the new men their first test of fire, but Fidel and most of the others preferred to break them in gradually. “[It was]
resolved,” wrote Che in his diary, “that we would walk through the bush toward [Pico] Turquino, trying to avoid battle.”
On March 25, a courier brought a message smuggled out of Frank País’s jail cell in Santiago. According to his sources, País wrote, Crescencio Pérez had struck a deal with Major Joaquín Casillas to betray their location to the army at a time when all the rebels were in one place and could be wiped out. In his diary, Che seemed to give credence to País’s information, for he already had reason to doubt Crescencio’s loyalty. The
guajiro
leader had been away for some time, entrusted with the mission of recruiting peasant fighters, and he had recently sent a message claiming to have enlisted 140 armed men. En route from the Díaz farm, however, Che had stopped in to see him and found only four men with him—the remnants of the convalescing fighters—and no new recruits. He had also found Crescencio confused and upset over Fidel’s decree to burn sugarcane. This disagreement underscored a gulf of incomprehension between the rebel leadership and its foremost peasant ally over revolutionary strategy at a crucial moment. The leaders could not be sure whether this had escalated to treason, but they could not take any chances. Fidel summoned his small group of most trusted men and told them they would mobilize.