Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
The two groups of rebels were reunited and went together to where the weapons were to be delivered, but no one came to the rendezvous, and they withdrew uncertainly back into the hills, where they met up with Crescencio Pérez. He had finally arrived with his long-promised band of peasant volunteers, twenty-four poorly armed men. They had stumbled onto an army patrol, attacked it, and escaped, but a young rebel had been taken prisoner, shot, and bayoneted to death, his body dumped in the road. Most of the rebels, including Che, demanded that revenge be exacted by killing an army corporal they had just taken prisoner, but Fidel insisted on releasing him unharmed. (Any lingering doubts over Crescencio’s loyalties either had been forgotten or were ironed out in secrecy, for Che never mentioned them again in his diary; nor has the episode in which he was under suspicion ever been referred to in other published accounts of the war.)
As the rebels awaited word about the new time and place for the weapons drop, the radio carried news that the trial in Santiago of a large number of July 26 Movement members, including survivors from the
Granma
, was over. As expected, the accused were sentenced to prison terms, but over the dissenting votes of the prosecutor and the tribunal president, Manuel Urrutia, who had bravely declared that because of the “abnormal situation” in the country, the defendants were within their constitutional rights to take up arms. An added bonus was the release of Frank País from custody, indicating that the authorities were still unaware of his true status in the rebel movement. These positive developments were followed by a quick visit of two July 26 men, who came to arrange the new weapons drop and revealed that they now had even more arms to deliver—“a total of about fifty irons,” Che noted gleefully.
Fidel was not cheered up by the good news. He was in a foul mood and was pointedly ignoring Andrew St. George, who had already spent two weeks with the rebels and was anxious to complete his assignment. (Bob Taber had left, taking with him two of the three American boys, who had decided to return to their homes.) St. George was planning a radio interview and had already submitted a questionnaire that Che had translated into Spanish. Since no one in the camp spoke English, and both he and St. George spoke French, Che had become his escort and interpreter, but Che was finding his role as intermediary with Fidel increasingly embarrassing. “His behavior
is really rude,” Che wrote in his journal. “During the photo session he didn’t move from his hammock, where he lay reading
Bohemia
”—a popular illustrated weekly magazine—“with an air of offended majesty, and finally he threw out all the members of the general staff.” Fidel kept postponing the interview with St. George for reasons that were hard to support—for instance, that the stream they were camped next to made too much noise. He finally did do the interview, but the next day it was reported on the radio that Taber’s film,
The Story of Cuba’s Jungle Fighters
, was to be broadcast throughout the United States, as was his radio interview with Fidel. Andrew St. George left the camp without saying good-bye.
The rebels faced a mass defection that began when one of the youngest recruits, a boy of fifteen, asked permission to leave on health grounds. Another man asked to go with him; then a sixteen-year-old joined in, and finally another man, who claimed “weakness.” Fidel ordered the older men in the group detained but let the youths go. Che disapproved, noting that if the boys were captured they might reveal where the weapons were to be delivered. But the weapons arrived the next day and were collected: three machine-gun tripods, three Madsen machine guns, nine M-1 carbines, ten Johnson repeaters, and 6,000 bullets. Che was ecstatic to learn that one of the Madsens would go to the
estado mayor
, and that he was to be in charge of it. “In this way,” he wrote later, “I made my debut as a full-time combatant, for until then I had been a part-time combatant and my main responsibility had been as the troop’s doctor. I had entered a new stage.”
With their new weapons, the rebels were ready to attack. The “new” troops were no longer new—after two months of steady hiking and foraging in the Sierra Maestra, they were tougher and leaner—but they were still not combat-tested, and it was time for their baptism of fire. The area they were in, Pino del Agua, was a timber extraction zone, dotted with sawmills and crisscrossed by roads frequently patrolled by the army. Che was eager to ambush some army troop trucks, but Fidel claimed he had a better plan: to attack the coastal army garrison at El Uvero. It was farther to the east than they had ever operated and, with sixty soldiers, would be the biggest target they had yet attacked; success would have a tremendous moral and political impact.
Fidel was able to count on the help of a childhood friend, Enrique López, who worked near El Uvero as the manager of a sawmill owned by the Lebanese-Cuban Babún brothers. The Babúns themselves—cement manufacturers, shipbuilders, and landowners with extensive lumber
interests in Oriente—had already secretly lent their cooperation to the rebels, helping to transport the latest cache of weapons on one of their company’s boats from Santiago, and then allowing their land to be used as the weapons drop. Enrique López had begun buying food and other supplies for the rebels, disguised within the purchases he made for his own employees.
As they began to mobilize, Fidel made some adjustments in the troops. Che was assigned a new squad of four youths to help carry and operate his Madsen machine gun. They were two brothers, Pepe and Pestan Beatón, a young man named Oñate—soon changed to “Cantinflas,” after the Mexican comic actor—and fifteen-year-old Joel Iglesias. Like El Vaquerito, Joel would go on to become one of Che’s devoted companions.
*
On the eve of battle, Fidel gave anyone who wanted to go a final opportunity to do so. Nine men went, leaving 127 to move out, heading deeper into the hills. They were camped in the mountains when they heard a startling report on the radio: an armed rebel expeditionary force had landed on the northern Oriente coast at Mayarí and run into an army patrol. Of the twenty-seven men on board, five had, reportedly, been captured. The Fidelistas didn’t know it yet, but this was the
Corynthia
, a boat that had left Miami days before under the command of a U.S. army veteran named Calixto Sánchez who was also one of Carlos Prío’s
auténticos
. The expedition, made up of
auténticos
and some Directorio men, was armed and paid for by Prío, who was apparently eager to field a force of his own to compete with Fidel. (The initial reports were misleading: twenty-three of the
Corynthia
’s men, including Sánchez, were captured, and then executed after a few days. A few months later, one of the three survivors reached the sierra and joined Fidel’s forces.)
Meanwhile, word came from Enrique López, the sawmill manager, that three
guardias
in civilian clothes were sniffing around, and Fidel sent some men to capture them. One of the
guardias
had fled by the time Fidel’s men arrived, but two of them—a black man and a white man—were brought back to the camp, where they confessed to being spies. “They inspired not pity, but repugnance for their cowardice,” Che wrote. They were both shot as the last order of business before the rebels set off for combat. “The pit was dug for the two
chivato
guards and the marching orders were given,” Che noted in his diary. “The rear guard executed them.”
They marched all night to reach El Uvero. As they neared the sawmill, they were met by another friendly employee of the Babún Company, Gilberto Cardero, who had been sent ahead to warn the sawmill administrator to evacuate his wife and children. Cardero reported that the family didn’t want to do anything that would attract suspicion, and they had refused to leave. Fidel said they would take precautions to avoid harming the civilians, but the attack would take place anyway, at dawn.
The rebels took their positions, but in the early morning light they realized that most of them couldn’t see the garrison clearly. Che had a clear view, although he was more than a quarter of a mile from the target. It was too late for changes, however, and the attack began with a shot from Fidel. “The machine guns began to rattle,” Che wrote. “The garrison returned fire with a great deal of effectiveness, as I realized later. Almeida’s people advanced in the open impelled by his fearless example. I could see Camilo advancing with his cap adorned with the July 26 armband. I advanced along the left with two helpers carrying clips and Beatón with the short machine gun.”
Che’s group was joined by several more men. They were within 200 feet of the enemy position now and continued to advance behind tree cover. Reaching open ground, they began to crawl, and a man at Che’s side, Mario Leal, was shot. After giving Leal mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Che covered his wound with the only bandage he could find, a piece of paper, and left him in the care of young Joel. He went back to his Madsen, firing at the garrison. Moments later another man, Manuel Acuña, fell wounded, hit in the right hand and arm. Then, just as the rebels were mustering their courage for a frontal assault, the garrison surrendered.
The Fidelistas had their victory, but it came at a high cost. They had lost six men, among them one of their original
guajiro
guides, Eligio Mendoza. He had flung himself into battle with abandon, claiming he had a saint who protected him, but within minutes he had been shot. Also dead was Julito Díaz, a veteran from the
Granma
, hit in the head at Fidel’s side soon after the fighting began. Mario Leal, shot in the head, and another man, Silleros, with a lung wound, were in critical condition. Seven others were wounded as well, including Juan Almeida, who had been hit in the right shoulder and leg. But they had killed fourteen soldiers, wounded nineteen more, and taken fourteen prisoners; only six soldiers had escaped. Remarkably, given the intense gunfire, none of the civilians in the area, including the administrator’s family, had been harmed.
Che was overwhelmed by the needs of the wounded—soldiers as well as rebels. “My knowledge of medicine had never been very extensive,” he wrote. “The number of wounded was enormous and my vocation at the
moment was not centered on health care.” He asked the garrison doctor for help, but despite his advanced age the man claimed he had little experience. “Once more I had to change from soldier to doctor, which in fact involved little more than washing my hands,” Che wrote. He saw to as many men as he could. “My first patient was Comrade Silleros. ... His condition was critical, and I was able only to give him a sedative and bind his chest tightly so he could breathe more easily. We tried to save him in the only way possible at that time. We took the fourteen prisoners with us and left our two [most] wounded men, Leal and Silleros, with the enemy, having received the doctor’s word of honor that they would be cared for. When I told this to Silleros, mouthing the usual words of comfort, he answered me with a sad smile that said more than any words could have, expressing his conviction that it was all over for him.” (In fact, the Cuban army treated the two wounded rebels with decency, but Silleros died before he reached a hospital. Mario Leal miraculously survived his head wound and spent the rest of the war in the Isle of Pines prison.)
Using the Babúns’ trucks, the rebels withdrew from El Uvero, carrying their dead and the men whose wounds were not critical and as much equipment as they could plunder from the garrison. Che collected medical supplies and was the last to leave. That evening he treated the wounded and was present for the burial of his six dead comrades at a bend in the road. Knowing that the army would soon be coming after them, it was agreed that Che would stay behind with the wounded men while the main column made its escape. Fidel’s friend Enrique López would be Che’s liaison, helping him with transportation and a hiding place for seven wounded men, a guide, and Che’s two faithful assistants, Joel and Cantinflas. Juan Vitalio “Vilo” Acuña, another of the sierra war veterans whose fate would forever be linked to Che’s own, also stayed behind to help his wounded uncle, Manuel Acuña.
After the war, Che credited the bloody action at El Uvero with having been a turning point for the rebel army. “If one considers that we had about 80 men and they had 53, for a total of 133 men, of whom 38—that is to say more than a quarter—were put out of action in a little over two and a half hours of fighting, one can see what kind of battle it was. It was an assault by men who had advanced bare-chested against an enemy protected by very poor defenses. Great courage was shown on both sides. For us this was the victory that marked our coming-of-age. From this battle on, our morale grew tremendously; our decisiveness and our hopes for triumph increased also.”
El Uvero had indeed caught the Batista regime off guard. During the long period of inactivity by Fidel’s rebels, the government had become overconfident.
Colonel Barrera Pérez had stayed in the sierra only a short while after taking over antiguerrilla operations in March. He had launched a “psyops” campaign to win over the sierra peasants with free food and medical services and then returned to Havana. Now he was now ordered back into the field. He set up a new command center at the Estrada Palma sugar mill, just north of the sierra foothills, and his hearts-and-minds campaign was shelved in favor of a tough new antiguerrilla strategy. His boss, the Oriente commander Díaz Tamayo, was replaced by a new officer, Pedro Rodríguez Ávila, with orders from Batista’s armed forces chief of staff, General Francisco Tabernilla, to crush the rebels by any means necessary. The new policy called for the forced evacuation of civilians from rebel areas, to create free-fire zones where the air force could conduct a massive aerial bombardment campaign. The action at El Uvero had showed the army that it couldn’t defend small garrisons in remote areas, so they were abandoned, leaving the territory open to the rebels.
After Fidel’s departure, Che confronted the nightmarish prospect of moving his wounded charges to safety in the face of an imminent army incursion. He had the added burden of the weapons captured from the garrison, too many for his fighters to carry. He was dependent on Enrique López for his escape; when López didn’t show up with a promised truck, Che had no choice but to conceal most of the arms temporarily and move out on foot. Most of the men were able to walk, although a man who had been shot in the lungs and another man with infected wounds were carried on improvised stretchers.