Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Che had visions of a proper social infrastructure for El Hombrito. He built a rudimentary hospital and had plans for another. Soon, in addition to his bread oven, there was an embryonic pig and poultry farm as well as a shoemaking and saddler’s workshop, and his “armory” was going full tilt. Work had begun to produce some primitive land mines and rifle-launched grenades, dubbed “Sputniks” in honor of the new Soviet satellites. Once they had obtained the right materials, the next project was to make mortars. To crown these achievements, Che commissioned the sewing of a huge July 26 flag emblazoned with
“Feliz Año 1958!”
to be placed at the summit of El Hombrito mountain. Che felt proud that he was establishing a “real authority” in the area, and, mindful of the marauding troops of Captain Sánchez Mosquera, he had his men construct antiaircraft shelters and defensive
fortifications along the routes leading into their little fiefdom. “We intend to stand fast here,” he wrote to Fidel on November 24, “and not give this place up for anything.”
Reports had come in that Sánchez Mosquera’s troops were on the march up the adjacent valley of Mar Verde, burning peasants’ homes as they went. Che dispatched Camilo Cienfuegos to ambush the troops. He followed, intending to hit the enemy column from behind. He and his men stuck to the flanking forested hills of the valley, trying to catch up with the soldiers without being seen. When they discovered that their new mascot, a puppy, was trailing them, Che ordered the fighter who was looking after the puppy, a man named Félix, to make it go back, but the little dog continued trotting loyally behind. They reached an arroyo where they rested, and the puppy inexplicably began howling. The men tried to hush it with comforting words, but the little dog didn’t stop. Che ordered it killed. “Félix looked at me with eyes that said nothing,” Che wrote later. “Very slowly he took out a rope, wrapped it around the animal’s neck, and began to tighten it. The cute little movements of the dog’s tail suddenly became convulsive, before gradually dying out, accompanied by a steady moan that escaped from its throat, despite the firm grasp. I don’t know how long it took for the end to come, but to all of us it seemed like forever. With one last nervous twitch, the puppy stopped moving. There it lay, sprawled out, its little head spread over the twigs.”
The band of men moved on without speaking. The enemy was now well beyond them. Hearing distant gunshots, they knew Camilo had struck, but when Che sent scouts ahead to check, they found nothing except a freshly dug grave. Che ordered it dug up, and they found the body of an enemy soldier. Whatever clash had taken place was over, and both the enemy troops and Camilo’s squad were gone. Disappointed at having missed the action, they walked back down the valley, reaching the hamlet of Mar Verde after nightfall. All its inhabitants had fled, leaving their possessions behind. The rebels cooked a pig and some yucca, and one of the men began singing along to a guitar.
“I don’t know whether it was the sentimental tune, or the darkness of night, or just plain exhaustion,” Che wrote. “What happened though, is that Félix, while eating seated on the floor, dropped a bone, and a dog came up meekly and grabbed it. Félix patted its head, and the dog looked at him. Félix returned the glance, and then he and I exchanged a guilty look. Suddenly everyone fell silent. An imperceptible stirring came over us. The dog’s meek yet roguish gaze seemed to contain a hint of reproach. There in our presence, although observing us through the eyes of another dog, was the murdered puppy.”
They were still in Mar Verde the next day when scouts brought word that Sánchez Mosquera’s troops were camped a little over a mile away. Camilo’s force had taken up a position nearby and was waiting for Che’s column before attacking. Che quickly moved his men to the spot. By dawn the next morning, November 29, the rebels were in ambush positions along the Río Turquino, covering all of Sánchez Mosquera’s possible escape routes. Che chose a particularly vulnerable spot for himself and his own unit; they would have to fire at point-blank range on any soldiers who came their way.
Che and two or three others were concealed behind trees when a small group of soldiers passed directly before them. Armed with only a Luger pistol, Che nervously rushed his first shot and missed. The firefight began, and in the confusion the soldiers escaped into the bush. Simultaneously, the other units opened up on the farmhouse where most of the enemy soldiers were positioned. During a lull in the firing, Joel Iglesias was hit by six bullets as he searched for the soldiers who had escaped. Che found him covered with blood but still alive. After evacuating the boy to his field hospital at El Hombrito, Che rejoined the fray, but Sánchez Mosquera’s troops were well entrenched and kept up a heavy return fire, making any rush on their position extremely dangerous. When army reinforcements began arriving, Che sent patrols to stop them while he kept Sánchez Mosquera pinned down. In an attempt to move in closer, Che’s friend Ciro Redondo, a fellow veteran of the
Granma
, was killed by a bullet in the head.
By mid-afternoon it was over. The enemy reinforcements had fought their way past Che’s positions, and he had finally ordered his men to retreat. It had been a bloody day. In addition to Ciro, they had lost another man when he was taken prisoner and then murdered; five more, including Joel, had been wounded. Expecting a pursuit by the army, they rushed back to El Hombrito to prepare themselves for the next showdown.
After a few feverish days preparing their defenses, the alert sounded: Sánchez Mosquera’s troops were on their way. Che had evacuated his wounded fighters and reserve stocks to a fallback position at La Mesa. To stop the enemy advance into El Hombrito, Che invested high hopes in his armory’s new land mines, which were placed along the approach road. When the soldiers did come, however, the mines didn’t explode, and Che’s forward ambush units had to retreat quickly; the enemy now had a clear path into El Hombrito. With little time to lose, Che and his men withdrew from the valley along a road leading up a hill they called Los Altos de Conrado, for a Communist peasant who lived there and had helped them. It was a steep climb to his abandoned house, the spot Che thought best to lie in wait for the enemy, and they found an ambush site behind a boulder overlooking the road. They were to wait there for the next three days.
This time, Che’s plan was modest but risky. Hidden behind a large tree next to the track, Camilo Cienfuegos would try to kill the first soldier who appeared, shooting at point-blank range. Sharpshooters flanking the road would then open fire while others began shooting from the front. Che and a couple of men were situated in a reserve position twenty yards away, but Che was only partially concealed behind a tree, and the men near him were in similarly exposed positions. He had ordered that no one was to peer out—they would know the soldiers had arrived only upon hearing the first shot—but Che broke his own rule to sneak a look.
“I could at that moment sense the tension prior to combat,” he wrote later. “I saw the first soldier appear. He looked around suspiciously and advanced slowly. ... I hid my head, waiting for the battle to begin. There was the crack of gunfire and then shooting became generalized.” The forest filled with the roar of combat as the two sides blasted away at each other at close quarters. The army hastily fired mortars, but they landed well beyond the rebels, and then Che was hit. “Suddenly I felt a disagreeable sensation, similar to a burn or the tingling of numbness. I had been shot in the left foot, which had not been protected by the tree trunk.”
Che heard some men moving through the brush in his direction and realized he was now defenseless. He had emptied his rifle clip and hadn’t had time to reload; his pistol had fallen on the ground and lay beneath him, but he couldn’t lift himself up to get it for fear of showing himself to the enemy. He rolled over in desperation and managed to grab the pistol just as he saw one of his own men, Cantinflas, coming toward him. Cantinflas had come to say that his own gun was jammed and that he was retreating. Che snatched the gun, adjusted the clip, and sent the youth off with an insult. In a display of courage, Cantinflas left the tree cover to fire upon the enemy, only to be hit by a bullet that entered his left arm and exited through his shoulder blade.
Both Che and Cantinflas were now wounded, with no idea where their comrades were, but they managed to crawl to help. Cantinflas was put in a hammock-stretcher, and Che, his adrenaline still pumping, walked the first part of the trip to a peasant collaborator’s house a mile or so away. Finally, the pain from his wound overcame him and he had to be lifted onto a horse.
On December 9, Che sent a letter to Fidel asking for more weapons and apologizing for having put himself in the line of fire. After sending the letter, he found that their situation wasn’t as bad as he had feared. The enemy troops had completely withdrawn from the area. There was other good news. Young Joel Iglesias would recover. In their new refuge, a doctor who had recently joined the rebels “operated” on Che, using a razor blade to extract the bullet from his foot, and he was able to start walking again. When
he returned to El Hombrito, however, he found devastation. “Our oven had been painstakingly destroyed; in the midst of the smoking ruins we found nothing but some cats and a pig; they had escaped the destructive fury of the invading army only to wind up in our mouths.” They would have to start all over again, but not in El Hombrito. As his first year of war came to an end, and 1958 began, Che set about erecting a new base at La Mesa.
In his letter of December 9 to Fidel, Che addressed a problem that went far beyond his immediate military situation. It concerned a growing dispute with the July 26 National Directorate in the llano. Che had never liked the llano people—nor had they, evidently, liked him—but now the relationship had reached the point of open acrimony.
The problem was formally over supply arrangements. Since becoming a
comandante
, Che had ignored Frank País’s successor, Daniel, as the rebel army’s Oriente coordinator and had made independent deals with suppliers. But that was only the surface problem. Che was now known within the National Directorate as a “radical” Marxist. To the growing alarm of Armando Hart and Daniel, who were both manifestly anticommunist, Che headed his own column with almost total autonomy and clearly enjoyed influence with Fidel, while their own rapport with Fidel had weakened. Che’s refusal to contact Daniel or use his organization in Santiago was undercutting the llano’s authority.
To resolve the growing rift, Daniel and Celia Sánchez had journeyed into the Sierra Maestra to see Fidel in late October. The visit coincided with new political developments. Armando Hart, as chief of the July 26 “general organization” in the llano, reported potentially positive moves made by the opposition parties to form a revolutionary government in exile, in which the July 26 Movement and Prío’s
auténticos
would predominate. At the same time, he wrote to Fidel in October, “cordial relations with certain diplomatic circles” were continuing, and he had learned that people “close to the [U.S.] embassy” had been talking with the ambassador on their behalf. “I think this is the best policy,” Hart concluded, “since we are kept up to date on everything happening there and of all the possible U.S. plans, and at the same time the Movement does not officially commit itself.”
In the wake of the failed Cienfuegos uprising, which had been endorsed covertly by the CIA, the Americans were probably hedging their bets, fishing around for an alternative means to see Batista out of office. A broad-based coalition of Cuba’s acceptable political groups—including a reined-in July 26 Movement—must have seemed like an ideal solution. The Cuban
conflict was getting out of hand, the army had proved itself utterly incapable of dealing the rebels a decisive blow, and Batista’s solution had been to unleash his dogs. Murders of rebel suspects by the police were now routine, and periodic massacres of peasants by the army in Oriente exacerbated the atmosphere of growing anarchy. An army colonel, Alberto del Río Chaviano, who was notorious for his role in the torture and murders of the Moncada rebels, had been promoted to take over the antiguerrilla campaign in the Sierra Maestra, and a $100,000 reward had been placed on Castro’s head.
Batista’s enemies were also stepping up the violence. In October and November, the July 26 Movement went after spies and traitors in the cities, finally putting an end to the life of El Gallego Morán, who had caused havoc after going to work for Batista’s military intelligence service. The brutal army commander of Holguín, Colonel Fermín Cowley, who was responsible for the massacre of the
Corynthia
men and numerous other murders, was assassinated. The rebels also stepped up their economic sabotage, burning cane fields on a much larger scale than before. To show he meant business, Fidel promised to burn his family’s own sizable cane fields in Birán.
Paradoxically, Cuba’s economy was booming in spite of the conflict, thanks to improved sugar prices and increased foreign investment, most of it from the United States. The American-owned nickel concerns in Oriente had recently announced expansion plans, and in Havana port facilities were being expanded to cope with the increasing maritime trade. Tourists continued to flood into Havana, and new luxury hotels were being built. The latest sugar harvest had been one of Cuba’s best, bringing several hundred million dollars in extra revenues to the state.
Uncertain about Batista’s ability to hold things together, Washington continued to give mixed signals to his regime. Despite increased dissatisfaction with Batista in the State Department and the CIA, the U.S. military was strongly supportive of him. Batista’s air force chief, Colonel Carlos Tabernilla, was awarded the U.S. Legion of Merit in November, and Batista himself was toasted as “a great general and a great president” in a speech by General Lemuel Sheperd of the Marine Corps. After a few months in his new post, Ambassador Earl Smith had heard more about the rebels’ “Communist influences” and was increasingly skeptical regarding Castro. He cabled CIA director Allen Dulles to suggest sending a spy into the Sierra Maestra to determine the “extent of Communist control” in the Movement.