Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Che decided to strike at the army on the other side of Pico Turquino to distract attention from Fidel’s group. As his troops started moving in that direction, one of the men Che had sent after the deserter returned on his own, claiming that his companion had also tried to desert and that he had killed him and left his body unburied. “I gathered the troop together on the hill facing the spot where this grim event had taken place,” Che wrote later. “I explained to our guerrillas what they were going to see and what it meant. I explained once again why desertion was punishable by death and why anyone who betrayed the revolution must be condemned. We passed silently, in single file, before the body of the man who had tried to abandon his post. Many of the men had never seen death before and were perhaps moved more by personal feelings for the dead man and by political weakness natural at that period than by any disloyalty to the revolution. These were difficult times, and we used this man as an example.”
In his diary at the time, however, Che expressed misgivings. “I am not very convinced of the legality of the death,” he wrote, “although I used it as an example. ... The body was on its stomach, showing at a glance that it had a bullet hole in the left lung and had its hands together and the fingers folded as if they were tied.”
Che had decided to hit the army garrison of Bueycito, a day’s march away. The attack took place on the night of July 31, but did not go according to plan. When some of his units didn’t show up on time, Che began the attack on his own, walking straight up to the barracks and coming face-to-face with the sentry. Che aimed his Thompson submachine gun and shouted “Halt!” but the sentry moved. Che pulled the trigger, aiming at the soldier’s chest. Nothing happened. A young rebel who was with Che then tried to shoot the sentry, but his rifle didn’t fire, either. At that point, Che’s survival instincts took over, and he ran away under a hail of bullets. By the time he repaired his tommy gun, the garrison had surrendered. Ramiro Valdés’s men had broken in from the rear and taken the twelve soldiers inside prisoner. Six soldiers were wounded, two fatally, and the rebels had lost one man. After looting the garrison, they set it on fire and left Bueycito in trucks, taking as prisoners the sergeant in charge of the post and
achivato
named Orán.
They entered the village of Las Minas to cheers, and Che indulged in some street theater with an Arab merchant. “A Moor
who is one of ours
improvised a speech asking that we set free the two prisoners. I explained to him that we had taken them to prevent [the army from] taking reprisals against the people but if that was the will of the inhabitants, I had nothing more to say.” After freeing the prisoners, the rebels went on their way, stopping only to bury their dead man in the local cemetery.
Antigovernment actions in Santiago had been stepped up to commemorate July 26, and police repression had also escalated. Arrests and killings of rebel suspects became commonplace; tortured bodies were found hanging from trees or dumped at roadsides. Frank País, the Movement coordinator for Oriente, had been in hiding in Santiago since his release from jail, moving from one safe house to the other, but in recent letters to Fidel he had expressed doubts about how much longer he could avoid detection. On July 30, his luck ran out. He and a companion were executed on the street, in broad daylight. País was twenty-three.
Frank País’s killing caused a huge outcry, with noisy antigovernment demonstrations. Strikes spread across the entire island, and Batista reim-posed a state of siege and media censorship. Unfortunately for him, the
events in Santiago coincided with a visit there by the new American ambassador, Earl Smith, who was on a get-acquainted tour.
By mid-1957, few officials in the State Department retained any illusions about Batista. His increasingly repressive and corrupt regime was becoming an embarrassment. In general, U.S. policy toward Cuba was aimed at protecting the sizable American economic interests there, and unrest was not good for business. The prevailing opinion in Washington was that the best method of defusing the violence would be to encourage Batista to “democratize” Cuba by holding elections—after which, it was hoped, one of the traditional parties would assume office. But Fidel’s persistence had thrown a wild card into the equation, and the State Department, CIA, and Department of Defense were divided over how best to deal with him. As a consequence, throughout 1957 and into 1958, various U.S. government agencies pursued their own, not always compatible, Cuban agendas.
Earl Smith had come away with the definite impression that the State Department wanted to see Batista out, and that it was actively, if covertly, supporting Castro’s bid for power. Roy Rubottom, the assistant secretary for Latin American affairs, and William Wieland, the newly appointed head of the Caribbean desk, both opposed Batista, as did the CIA’s Cuban specialist, J. C. King. When Smith got to Cuba, he found the CIA men there to be anti-Batista as well. The officers in the American military mission, on the other hand, continued to enjoy a close relationship with their Cuban counterparts. The anticommunist police bureau, BRAC, functioned with American support, and, more controversially, Batista’s military was using American war matériel that had been assigned to Cuba for “hemispheric defense” in its antiguerrilla campaign.
Opinion was divided as to Castro’s political orientation, but few policy makers credited Batista’s repeated denunciations of him as a Communist. At his first press conference, Smith had trod a careful line by praising Cuba’s efforts in the common struggle against Communism, while saying he did not believe Castro was pro-Communist. But in Santiago, after witnessing the police turn their batons and water hoses on a crowd of demonstrating women, Smith publicly deplored the rough police tactics and, before leaving, laid a wreath at País’s tomb. This gesture gave Cubans hope of a policy shift in Washington, for it stood out in sharp contrast to the pro-Batista attitudes of Smith’s predecessor, Arthur Gardner. The unpopular Gardner had never said anything publicly to criticize Batista’s excesses and privately had gone so far as to suggest that he send an assassin into the sierra to kill Fidel.
After Smith’s remarks about police brutality in Santiago, the debate over Castro began to heat up, with Batista’s officials and American ultra-conservatives accusing Washington of going soft on Communism. In August,
the ubiquitous Spruille Braden, who had served as U.S. ambassador during Batista’s first elected term as president during World War II, threw down the gauntlet, denouncing Castro as a Communist “fellow traveler.”
The CIA was, in fact, already pursuing contacts with the Movement through officials stationed in Santiago and Havana. The first inkling of such contacts is revealed in Che’s scathing reference to Armando Hart’s letter “suggesting a deal with the Yankee embassy” in April 1957. The next reference is in a letter of July 5 sent by Frank País to Fidel, saying that he had managed to get an American visa for Lester “El Gordito” Rodríguez, a July 26 member who was to help coordinate U.S. fund-raising and arms purchases for the rebels. “The very meritorious and valuable American embassy came to us and offered any kind of help in exchange for our ceasing to loot arms from their [Guantánamo] base,”
*
País wrote to Fidel. “We promised this in exchange for a two-year visa for El Gordito and for them to get him out of the country. Today they fulfilled their promise: the consul took him out personally, and the papers, letters, and the maps that he needed were taken out in the diplomatic pouch. Good service.”
On July 11, País wrote to Fidel again: “María A. told me very urgently at noon today that the American vice consul wanted to talk with you, in the presence of some other man, but she didn’t know who. ... I’m sick and tired of so much backing and forthing and conversations from the embassy, and I think it would be to our advantage to close ranks a bit more, without losing contact with them, but not giving them as much importance as we now do; I see that they are maneuvering but I can’t see clearly what their real goals are.”
In his biography of Castro, Tad Szulc wrote that between autumn 1957 and mid-1958 the CIA paid out at least $50,000 to various July 26 agents. Szulc named Robert Wiecha as the man who disbursed the funds.
In an undated reply to Frank País, Fidel agreed to the meeting with the vice-consul. “I don’t see why we should raise the slightest objection to the U.S. diplomat’s visit,” he wrote. “We can receive any U.S. diplomat here, just as we would any Mexican diplomat or a diplomat from any country.” He then continued with the kind of bombast that seems to indicate he expected the letter to be passed on to the Americans. “If they wish to have closer ties of friendship with the triumphant democracy of Cuba? Magnificent! This is a sign they acknowledge the final outcome of this battle. If they propose friendly mediation? We’ll tell them no honorable mediation, no patriotic mediation—no mediation is possible in this battle.”
The meeting between Fidel and the CIA men seems never to have come about. Possibly it was postponed because of País’s death and then dropped when the CIA’s policy shifted. But the agency’s contacts with the National Directorate’s llano officials continued for some time, and evidently paid off in funding and possibly other forms of aid to the Movement. It is worth noting that the CIA’s overtures coincided with País’s meetings with representatives of a group of reformist officers at Cuba’s Cienfuegos naval base who were plotting an uprising against Batista. William Williamson, the CIA’s number two man in Havana, had told the naval conspirators that if they were successful, they could count on U.S. recognition. By July, the group had made contact with Faustino Pérez in Havana and País in Santiago to propose an alliance of forces. After hearing them out, País had strongly endorsed the plan and passed it along to Fidel.
It was a tempting proposition. The officers were planning not a mere barracks coup but a full-scale uprising to oust Batista, assisted by dissident factions within the air force and army, with simultaneous uprisings in Cienfuegos, Santiago, and Havana. Despite his public opposition to any kind of post-Batista military junta that could preempt his own bid for power, Fidel was not one to miss an opportunity and had little to lose by supporting the Cienfuegos plotters. First, it would be the Movement’s llano people, not his men from the sierra, who would take part, giving him some deniability if the plot was discovered. Second, if he opposed the plan and the conspirators were successful, he would have alienated them and would still be trapped in the mountains. Of course, if he
did
help, there was the risk he could be outmaneuvered, but he could then continue to fight from the hills, as he had promised in the manifesto. For the time being, Fidel’s position was good. The Americans and, now, Cuban military mutineers were coming to
him
. He had become a power broker, and he could afford to remain circumspect about the deals on offer while continuing to fight his war in the sierra.
In the meantime, he faced other problems. País’s murder came at a time of mounting tension between Fidel and the National Directorate in the llano over the control and direction of the July 26 Movement. Since their meeting at Epifanio Díaz’s farm in February, País and Faustino Pérez had continued to lobby Fidel to permit the establishment of a “second front.” They had a double agenda. A second guerrilla front would not only ease matters for Fidel’s rebels by helping to divert the attention of the army but also offset Fidel’s maneuverings to exercise total control of the armed struggle. Fidel was just as adamant that the Movement make the support of
his
fighters in the sierra its priority; until his forces were secure, he argued, no arms should be diverted elsewhere.
During their time in prison together, Carlos Franqui, Faustino Pérez, and Armando Hart had talked at length with jailed representatives of most of the other Cuban opposition parties. They had concluded that insurmountable differences of ideology prevented a July 26 alliance of forces with the Partido Socialista Popular, Cuba’s Communist Party, which remained critical of Fidel’s “putschist” strategy for taking power. There seemed to be genuine possibilities, however, of a pact with the Directorio, although so far a working alliance had been thwarted, owing primarily to the Directorio’s fears about Fidel’s perceived caudillismo tendencies. The llano officials themselves had begun to resent Fidel’s autocratic demands and ceaseless complaints. His letters show that he regarded them more as his suppliers than as equal partners in a common struggle involving both rural and urban guerrilla warfare. He seemed oblivious of the precarious existence they led in the cities, exposed to the constant dangers of arrest, torture, and execution.
In addition to their efforts to broaden the Movement’s links with other groups, the llano people oversaw the campaign of urban bombings, sabotage, and assassination as well as counterintelligence operations within the armed forces. They also operated clandestine safe houses, clinics, and arms-smuggling rings. Now they had the added duty of implementing the campaign of rural and industrial sabotage as decreed by Fidel in his February “Appeal”: the formation of a national workers’ front to compete with the labor union movement controlled by Batista, organizing a general strike, and, last but not least, the unceasing program to supply Fidel with money and weapons through the Resistencia Cívica network.
The prospect of opening new guerrilla fronts became feasible only after the Movement seized the weapons left over from the Directorio’s assault on the presidential palace. Some of these had been sent to Fidel just before El Uvero, but Frank País had used the rest of the weapons to establish a new rebel group led by a former law student, René Ramos Latour, aka “Daniel.” Daniel’s group had based itself in Oriente’s small but strategic Sierra Cristal mountain range—east of the Sierra Maestra, with Santiago on one side and Guantánamo on the other. Its first action in June against an army garrison had failed and resulted in the loss of many arms and several men. Frank País had rescued some weapons and hidden Daniel and twenty of his men at safe houses in Santiago. País had then come up with an audacious new plan: to explode a bomb at a pro-Batista rally being held by the political gangster Rolando Masferrer, who was the leader of a paramilitary force called Los Tigres. The bomb had failed to go off, and, soon after, the final blow to País’s bid to assert himself had come when his own brother, Josué, and two comrades were killed.