Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Following these failures, País had begun lobbying Fidel to widen his political appeal by forging links with mainstream political figures, including encouraging the visit of Raúl Chibás and Felipe Pazos to the sierra. He had also outlined a plan with Armando Hart—who coincidentally had just escaped from police custody—to revamp the entire structure of the Movement by putting decision making in the hands of a new executive body, while six provincial leaders would form a new National Directorate. The plan implied a vast curtailment of Fidel’s powers. He would be reduced to being one of the six provincial leaders. “If you have any suggestions or tasks to be done,” País wrote Fidel, “tell me so. In any case, when the draft of the program is complete, I will send it for you to look over and give your opinion.”
Fidel’s response came in the form of his Sierra Maestra Manifesto, effectively quashing País’s curtailment efforts. Writing to him afterward, Fidel deftly avoided mentioning País’s proposal, saying ambiguously, “I’m very happy—and I congratulate you—that you so clearly saw the necessity of formulating working plans on a national and systematic scale. We’ll keep fighting here as long as it is necessary. And we’ll finish this battle with either the death or triumph of the
real
Revolution.”
A couple of weeks later, Frank País was dead, and Fidel made haste to fill the breach. The day after his murder, on July 31, Fidel wrote to Celia Sánchez expressing his sorrow and outrage over the loss and asking her to assume “a good portion of Frank’s work.” Meanwhile, to replace País on the National Directorate, he proposed Faustino Pérez, and urged her to bring him up to date on País’s duties. On this matter, however, the National Directorate won a rare victory over Fidel, choosing not Pérez but Daniel—René Ramos Latour—as País’s replacement.
Lately, to implement his wishes, Fidel had begun to rely more and more heavily on Celia Sánchez, whom he regularly bombarded with letters, telling her she was indispensable to his survival and complaining bitterly about the lack of support of the llano. Indeed, ever since their first meeting in February, Celia had become Fidel’s primary confidante in the llano, and now her authority increased. The other July 26 officials quickly comprehended Celia’s new status, and began dealing with her as their principal intermediary with Fidel.
As Daniel tried to carry on País’s effort to assert more control over Fidel and his rebels, he singled out Che in particular as someone who needed to be reined in, complaining to Fidel that Che had not even contacted him since he had replaced País, and was causing problems by making his own supply arrangements with people not authorized by the Directorate. Fidel’s
response was to ignore Daniel while sending increasingly bitter letters to Celia about the llano’s “abandonment” of the sierra.
As Che prepared for another attack against the forces of Major Joaquín Casillas, he found himself dealing with the usual problems of green recruits, deserters, and
chivatos
. A group of new volunteers from Las Minas joined him, among them his first female volunteer, a seventeen-year-old girl named Oniria Gutiérrez. In the usual pattern, though, he let several of them go a few days later when they began showing signs of
cofard
, the French word he used to describe cowardice.
David Gómez, his overseer collaborator, apparently had been arrested, tortured, and murdered. The army had then occupied the Peladero estate where Gómez worked and had pressured one of the workers into telling them everything he knew about the rebels’ local ties. “The result was that they killed 10 people, including two of David’s muleteers, took all the merchandise, burned down all the houses in the area, and beat several of the neighbors badly, some of whom later died and others, like Israel’s father, who suffered broken bones,” Che wrote in his diary. “According to the reports, there were three
chivatos
, and I asked for volunteers to kill them. Several offered themselves but I chose Israel, his brother Samuel, Manolito, and Rodolfo. They left early with some little signs that read:
Executed for being a traitor to the people M-26-7
.”
The execution team returned a week later, having tracked down and killed one of the
chivatos
. The reports of David Gómez’s death turned out to be inaccurate; he later came personally to tell Che that although he had been arrested and brutally tortured, he had not opened his mouth.
By late August, Che’s column was camped in the valley of El Hombrito. Despite his efforts to seek out the enemy, his men had seen no combat since Bueycito nearly a month before. On August 29, a peasant warned Che of a large column of enemy soldiers approaching, then led him to where the soldiers were camped. Che decided to attack immediately, before the enemy advanced farther. That night he positioned his fighters along both sides of a trail leading from the soldiers’ bivouac, up which they would march the following day. His plan was to allow the first ten or twelve soldiers to pass, then ambush the middle of the column, dividing the soldiers into two groups that could be easily surrounded and picked off.
At first light, the soldiers roused themselves and began climbing the hill toward them. Che felt restless, anxious about the coming battle and eager to test his new Browning for the first time. As the soldiers drew near, Che began
counting. But one of the men shouted, and Che reacted reflexively, opening fire and shooting the sixth man in line. At his second shot, and before his own men had reacted, the first five soldiers vanished from sight. Che ordered his units to attack; as they did, the enemy column recovered from its surprise and opened fire with bazookas. Che ordered a retreat to a fallback position, and learned that Hermes Leyva, Joel Iglesias’s cousin, had been killed. From their new vantage point, a little over half a mile away, they watched as the soldiers advanced, stopped, and then, in full view of them, desecrated Leyva’s body by burning it. “In our impotent rage,” recalled Che, “we were limited to long-range firing, which they answered with bazookas.”
They exchanged fire all day, and by nightfall the enemy column had retreated. To Che, the action constituted a “great triumph,” despite the fact that he had lost a valuable man and captured only one enemy weapon. With their handful of arms, his men had fought off 140 soldiers armed with bazookas, halting their advance. But a few days later, Che learned that the company had murdered several peasants and burned down their homes in reprisal for their suspected complicity with his forces, a chastening reminder of the price paid by unprotected civilians after rebel attacks in their areas. Che resolved to evacuate civilians in advance of attacks to prevent more such atrocities.
After the battle, Che met up again with Fidel, who had just attacked an army encampment near Las Cuevas; he had lost four men but inflicted casualties and forced the army to retreat. Deciding to press their advantage, Fidel and Che planned a coordinated attack on Pino del Agua, where there was a small army garrison. If they found troops, they would attack; if not, they would advertise their presence and draw the army into the hills. Fidel’s column would be the bait, while Che would lay an ambush. With the plan worked out, the two columns headed toward the target area.
But in Che’s column, things were not going well. There were several more desertions, and then a young rebel, disarmed after being insubordinate with his lieutenant, borrowed a revolver and shot himself in the head before his shocked comrades. When he was buried, a disagreement ensued between Che and some of his men over whether or not the dead youth should be given military honors. Che was opposed. “I argued that committing suicide under such conditions should be repudiated, whatever good qualities the man may have possessed. After a few stirrings of insubordination by some of the men, we wound up holding a wake, without rendering him honors.”
The discontent among his men spurred Che to take strict new measures, and he named a young rebel to head up a new disciplinary commission. It was a decision that caused bad blood among the fighters. Enrique Acevedo, a fifteen-year-old runaway who had recently joined the column
as a
descamisado
with his older brother, Rogelio, recalled the disciplinary commission as being like a small military police unit. “Among other things,”Acevedo said, “it was supposed to make sure that nobody talked in loud voices, didn’t light fires before nightfall, to ensure that there were buckets of water next to fires in case an airplane appeared ..., to check up on those doing guard duty, and to prevent anyone from keeping a diary. They made sure that we felt the severity of the new disciplinary measures. It became a nightmare for all of us.”
Che’s penchant for strict discipline was notorious among the rebels, and there were those who asked to be transferred out of his column. Young Acevedo, who had been allowed to stay on despite Che’s initial rejection—
“What do you think this is, an orphanage or a crèche?”
—continued to observe Che with great caution. In his own “illegal” diary, he wrote: “Everyone treats him with great respect. He is hard, dry, and at times ironic with some men. His manners are smooth. When he gives an order you can see he really commands respect. It is obeyed at once.”
A few days later, the brothers witnessed an example of Che’s summary justice. Enrique Acevedo recorded the moment vividly: “At dawn they bring in a big man dressed in green, head shaved like the military, with big mustaches: it’s [René] Cuervo, who is stirring up trouble in the zone of San Pablo de Yao and Vega la Yua. He has committed abuses under the flag of the July 26. ... Che receives him in his hammock. The prisoner tries to give him his hand, but doesn’t find a response. What is said doesn’t reach our ears, even though their words are strong. It seems to be a summary trial. At the end [Che] sends him away with a contemptuous gesture of his hand. They take him to a ravine and they execute him with a .22 rifle, because of which they have to give him three shots. [Finally] Che jumps out of his hammock and shouts: ‘Enough!’”
Che was unapologetic about his decision to kill Cuervo. “Using the pretext of fighting for the revolutionary cause and executing spies, he simply victimized an entire section of the population of the sierra, perhaps in collusion with the army,” he wrote. “In view of his status as a deserter, the trial was speedy, then proceeding to his physical elimination. The execution of antisocial individuals who took advantage of the prevailing atmosphere in the area to commit crimes was, unfortunately, not infrequent in the Sierra Maestra.”
A few weeks later, a more merciful side of Che was revealed. After ambushing a truckload of soldiers near Pino del Agua, Che approached to inspect the damage. “In capturing the first truck, we found two dead and one wounded soldier, who was still going through the motions of fighting as he lay dying,” he wrote. “One of our fighters finished the man off without
giving him an opportunity to surrender—which he was unable to do, being only half-conscious. The combatant responsible for this barbaric act had seen his family wiped out by Batista’s army. I reproached him violently, unaware that my remarks were overheard by another wounded soldier, concealed and motionless under some tarpaulins on the truck bed. Emboldened by my words and by the apology of our comrade, the enemy soldier made his presence known and begged us not to kill him. He had a fractured leg and remained at the side of the road while the battle went on elsewhere. Every time a fighter passed near him he would shout, ‘Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! Che says not to kill prisoners!’ When the battle was over we transported him to the sawmill and gave him first aid.”
As they made their way through the hills during that first week of September, the rebels heard that the national uprising had finally taken place. On September 5, rebels had attacked and seized the naval base and police headquarters in the city of Cienfuegos. Along with the naval mutineers and a smattering of men from other groups, including Prío’s
auténticos
, a large number of July 26 fighters had participated. But things hadn’t gone as planned. At the last minute, the rebel’s coconspirators in Havana and Santiago had stalled, and the Cienfuegos uprising had gone off alone.
The rebels held the city that morning, but by afternoon the regime had sent in tanks from the large Santa Clara garrison and dispatched American-made B-26 bombers to hit them from the air. The rebels committed the fatal mistake of making a stand in the city instead of escaping to the nearby Escambray mountains, and they were slaughtered. The three July 26 officials involved—Javier Pazos, acting head of the Havana underground; Julio Camacho, action chief for Las Villas province; and Emilio Aragonés, the July 26 leader for Cienfuegos—managed to flee, but as many as 300 of the estimated 400 men involved from various organizations were killed, many of them by being shot after surrendering. The revenge taken against the rebels was barbaric. Reports emerged of wounded men being buried alive, and the captured ringleader, the former naval lieutenant Dionisio San Román, was tortured for months before being killed.
It had been the biggest and bloodiest action so far in the Cuban conflict, and there was plenty of fallout. Fidel was accused of treachery by Justo Carrillo, a former cabinet minister under Prío and leader of his own “Montecristi” anti-Batista group, who had been in league with one of the military factions involved in the conspiracy. Previously, Carrillo had provided money to the July 26 Movement; he flirted with—but declined—Fidel’s invitation for an
alliance at the time of the Sierra Pact. Now, Carrillo accused Fidel of perfidy for allegedly giving his go-ahead to the Cienfuegos revolt, knowing it would fail and result in the deaths of the military men whom he saw as rivals for power. Indirectly answering this charge later, Che wrote, “The July 26 Movement, participating as an unarmed ally, could not have changed the course of events, even if its leaders had seen the outcome clearly, which they did not. The lesson for the future is: he who has the strength dictates the strategy.”
But Batista would also face repercussions from Cienfuegos. His use of U.S.-supplied firepower in quelling the revolt was a blatant breach of U.S. defense treaties with Cuba; the tanks and B-26 bombers had been supplied for Cuba’s hemispheric defense, not to suppress internal uprisings. The Americans asked for explanations, and when these weren’t forthcoming, they began considering the suspension of arms shipments to the regime.