Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Meanwhile, in the Sierra Maestra, Che and Fidel had drawn close to their next military target. On September 10, the two columns reached Pino del Agua. Fidel made sure the locals knew where he was headed, expecting someone to leak it to the army, and then he marched his column off. That night Che surreptitiously set up his ambushes along the roads and trails where the enemy forces were expected to arrive. If their plan worked, they hoped to hit a motorized army convoy and capture several trucks. After a week of waiting in a forest on a cliff overlooking one of the main roads, Che finally heard the sounds of truck engines. The enemy had seized the bait.
As battles went, it was a decidedly small-scale affair. Once the ambush began, two truckloads of soldiers were able to escape, but the rebels captured the three remaining trucks—which they burned—as well as some valuable new weapons and ammunition. They had also killed three soldiers and taken one prisoner, a corporal who ended up joining them and becoming their cook. But to their great sadness, they lost “Crucito,” a
guajiro
poet who had entertained the fighters in poetic dueling sessions with the other rebel lyricist, Calixto Morales. Crucito had nicknamed himself “the nightingale of the Maestra” and dubbed his rival “the buzzard of the plains.”
Che moved his men toward Peladero, where Fidel’s column had headed. Along the way, he confiscated a mule owned by a merchant who was believed to be pro-Batista and friendly with the large landowners. “Juan Balansa had a mule, celebrated in the vicinity for its staying power, and as a kind of war tax, we made off with it,” Che wrote. The mule showed itself to be surefooted and agile, and Che took it as his own personal mount and
kept it until it was “recaptured” by Captain Angel Sánchez Mosquera, the officer who was becoming his bête noire, later in the war.
The Sierra Maestra was now crawling with armed men, and a kind of anarchy reigned as deserters, freelance outlaw groups, and some of the rebels themselves committed abuses, using their weapons and the absence of government control to rob, rape, and commit murder. The rigid code of conduct for rebel behavior, meanwhile, was causing resentment, particularly in Che’s column, where tension was running high over the zeal displayed by his newly appointed “disciplinary commission.” The situation now reached a bloody climax.
A couple of days after his column had arrived at Peladero, Che went off to meet Fidel, who was camped nearby. Not long after he and Fidel had begun talking, Ramiro Valdés came to interrupt them. Something very bad had happened. “Lalo Sardiñas, in an impulsive act of punishment toward an undisciplined comrade, had held his pistol to the man’s head as if to shoot him,” Che wrote later. “The gun went off unintentionally and the man was killed on the spot. There were stirrings of a riot among the troops.” Che found himself facing a full-scale mutiny over Lalo’s action, with many of the men demanding a summary trial and execution. He began to take evidence from the men, some of whom said Lalo had carried out an act of premeditated murder, though others said it was an accident. A trial was held to determine Lalo’s fate. He was not only an officer but a good and brave fighter, and both Che and Fidel wished to spare his life, but the other fighters had to be consulted, and their speeches made it obvious that most of them wanted the death penalty. Che finally spoke out: “I tried to explain that the comrade’s death had to be ascribed to the conditions of the struggle,” he recounted later, “to the very fact that we were at war, and that it was after all the dictator Batista who was guilty. My words, however, were not convincing to this hostile audience.”
Fidel’s turn came next. According to Che’s account, he spoke at length in Lalo’s defense. “He explained that, in the end, this reprehensible act had been committed in defense of the concept of discipline and that we should keep that fact in mind.” Many of the men were swayed by what Che termed Fidel’s “enormous powers of persuasion,” but many still disagreed. Finally, it was determined that a vote would be held to put the matter to rest: Lalo would be either shot to death or demoted. The majority would decide. Che tallied up the votes in a notebook. In the end, of the 146 fighters, seventy voted for death, seventy-six for demotion.
Lalo’s life was spared. He was stripped of his rank and ordered to win his rehabilitation by fighting as a common soldier. But the matter hadn’t ended. A large group of fighters remained unhappy over the decision, and
the next day they threw down their weapons and demanded to leave. Curiously, among them were the head of Che’s disciplinary commission and several of its members. As was his custom when writing about this incident later on, Che made sure to point out that among those who left, some went on to betray the revolution. “These men, who had not respected the majority and abandoned the struggle, subsequently put themselves at the service of the enemy, and it was as traitors that they returned to fight on our soil.”
In spite of Che’s best efforts at ascribing treasonous motivations to the men who left, the incident is less convincing as a moral tale than as a glimpse into Che’s hardened personality. His trail through the Sierra Maestra was littered with the bodies of
chivatos
, deserters, and delinquents, men whose killings he had ordered and in some cases carried out himself. The code of discipline he had imposed within and without his growing family of fighters had created an atmosphere in which acts such as Lalo’s could easily occur. The leader sets the example. Che’s underlings were merely imitating his behavior in their own crude way.
After the mutiny, Fidel transferred some fighters to Che’s command to replace those who had left and named a substitute for Lalo: Camilo Cienfuegos. The handsome, blond, extroverted former baseball player now became the captain of Che’s vanguard platoon. It was a good move, for Camilo’s devil-may-care personality helped offset Che’s strictness. The two men were mutually respectful, and Che allowed Camilo a degree of intimacy that he permitted no one else. Their dialogues were ribald banter laced with friendly put-downs and goads.
Camilo’s first mission was to hunt down a group of “bandits” who were committing their crimes under the banner of the revolution. While he went off in their pursuit, Che returned to the area that was becoming his own headquarters—the valley of El Hombrito. Since his ambush there in August the army had not returned, and Che had begun to establish the rudiments of a permanent base. He had left a
guajiro
named Aristidio in charge of a halfway house for new volunteers in the valley and had even built an oven for baking bread. The area was calm, but it was assumed that Sánchez Mosquera, who had established a base in Minas de Bueycito, would launch a raid into the mountains soon. Aristidio was evidently not immune to the general sense of alarm, for in Che’s absence he had sold his revolver and imprudently told people he planned to make contact with the army before it arrived. “These were difficult moments for the revolution,” Che recalled. “In my capacity as chief of the sector, we conducted a very summary investigation, and Aristidio was executed.”
The adolescent Enrique Acevedo watched as Aristidio was brought in. “By our side passes a barefoot prisoner, they have him tied. It’s Aristidio.
Nothing remains of his chieftain’s façade. Later a shot can be heard. When we get to the place they are throwing the dirt on top of him. At dawn, after an exhausting day, he [Che] explains to us that Aristidio was executed for misusing the funds and resources of the guerrillas.”
Che later sounded almost apologetic about Aristidio’s fate. “Aristidio was a typical example of a peasant who joined the ranks of the revolution without having any clear understanding of its significance. ... Today we may ask ourselves whether he was really guilty enough to deserve death, and if it might not have been possible to save a life that could have been put to use by the revolution in its constructive phase. War is harsh, and at a time when the enemy was intensifying its aggressiveness, one could not tolerate even the suspicion of treason. It might have been possible to spare him months earlier, when the guerrilla movement was much weaker, or months later, when we were far stronger.”
After executing Aristidio, Che moved off toward Pico Caracas to help Camilo hunt down an armed gang led by “Chino Chang,” a Chinese-Cuban bandit who had robbed and killed peasants in the vicinity. Camilo had already captured some of the culprits and was holding them pending their trial before a revolutionary tribunal. For the first time, the rebels had a real lawyer on hand to implement their system of justice: Humberto Sorí-Marín, a well-known attorney and July 26 man from Havana. Most of the members of the Chino Chang gang were acquitted, but Chang himself and a peasant who had raped a girl were sentenced to death. As usual, Che observed their last moments with a keen eye, noting whether they displayed courage or cowardice as they met death: “First we executed Chino Chang and the peasant rapist. They were tied to a tree in the forest, both of them calm. The peasant died without a blindfold, his eyes facing the guns, shouting ‘Long live the revolution!’ Chang met death with absolute serenity but asked for the last rites to be administered by Father Sardiñas”—a priest from Santiago who had joined the rebels but who wasn’t then in the camp. “Since we were unable to grant this request, Chang said he wanted it known he had asked for a priest, as if this public testimony would serve as an extenuating circumstance in the hereafter.”
The rebels decided to teach three young members of the gang a lesson by conducting a mock execution. The boys went through the experience of being sentenced to death and, after witnessing Chang’s and the rapist’s executions, awaited their own. “They had been deeply involved in Chang’s outrages,” Che explained, “but Fidel felt they should be given another chance. We blindfolded them and subjected them to the anguish of a simulated firing squad. After shots were fired in the air, the boys realized they were still very much alive. One of them threw himself on me,
and, in a spontaneous gesture of joy and gratitude, gave me a big noisy kiss, as if I were his father.” As Che told it later, the decision to spare their lives proved worthwhile; the three stayed in the Rebel Army, one of them in Che’s column, and earned their redemption by becoming “good fighters for the revolution.”
The journalist Andrew St. George had reappeared and was present for the executions—both simulated and real—and took photographs of the events as they unfolded. His photographs and accompanying article were published in
Look
magazine, and he also apparently filed reports to American intelligence. (St. George never refuted allegations that he used his visits to gather information on Fidel and the Movement for the U.S. government.)
A few days later, more transgressors were caught. Among them was Dionisio Oliva, a peasant who had been instrumental in unmasking Eutimio Guerra; in the intervening months he and his brother-in-law had stolen provisions intended for the rebels and become cattle rustlers. Dionisio had also commandeered private homes in which he maintained two mistresses. Captured along with them were several others, including a youth named Echeverría. Several of Echeverría’s brothers were rebels, and one had even been aboard the
Granma
, but this boy had joined a freelance armed gang. Still, as Che admitted, his case was “poignant.” Echevarría begged to be allowed to die in battle—he did not want to disgrace his family by dying in front of a revolutionary firing squad—but the tribunal’s decision was firm. Before he was shot, Che said, Echeverría wrote a letter to his mother, “explaining the justice of his punishment and asking her to remain faithful to the revolution.”
The last man to die was none other than El Maestro, Che’s skittish companion during his asthma-plagued trek to meet the new volunteers from Santiago. Claiming illness, El Maestro had since left the guerrillas and “dedicated himself to a life of immoralities.” His real crime was passing himself off as Che “the doctor” and attempting to rape a peasant girl who came to him as a patient.
Fidel later talked about these executions with the July 26 journalist Carlos Franqui. He was dishonest in his account of the number of executions he had authorized during the war but became downright voluble in the case of El Maestro. “We lined up very few people before firing squads, very few indeed. During the entire war we did not shoot more than ten guys in twenty-five months,” Fidel said. But as for El Maestro, “He was an orangutan; he grew a huge beard. He was also a born clown and carried loads as though he were Hercules, but he was a bad soldier. ... What stupidity to pretend he was Che, in that area, where we had spent a long time, where
everyone knew all of us. ... And now, with the new beard, El Maestro was passing himself off as Che:
‘Bring me women. I’m going to examine them all!’
Did you ever hear of anything so outrageous? We shot him.”
After the wave of executions, Che and his men headed back to El Hombrito. It was now late October 1957, and Che wanted to begin building an “industrial” infrastructure to sustain a permanent guerrilla presence there. His ambitions were given a boost by the arrival of a couple of former students from Havana University who were put to work building a dam to produce hydroelectric energy from the Río Hombrito. Their other task was to help start a guerrilla newspaper,
El Cubano Libre
(The Free Cuban). By early November, they had printed the first issue, run off on a vintage 1903 mimeograph machine.
Che began writing a series of columns titled “The Wild Shot” under his old nickname, the Sniper. In his first article, “The Beginning of the End,” he took aim at the issue of American military aid to Batista, deftly pegging it to the recent protests by animal lovers outside the UN building in New York over the Soviet decision to send a dog named Laika into space aboard Sputnik II. (The month before, the Soviets had launched Sputnik I, the world’s first satellite, into orbit around the earth.) “Compassion fills our soul at the thought of the poor animal that will die gloriously to further a cause that it doesn’t understand,” Che wrote. “But we haven’t heard of any philanthropic American society parading in front of the noble edifice asking clemency for our
guajiros
, and they die in good numbers, machine-gunned by the P-47 and B-26 airplanes ... or riddled by the troops’ competent M-1s. Or is it that within the context of political convenience a Siberian dog is worth more than a thousand Cuban
guajiros
?”