Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Che with the men of Column No. 4 in El Hombrito, in front of a banner proclaiming “Happy 1958.”
“When we were in El Hombrito,” Pardo recalled, “I heard it said that there were some peasants who belonged to the PSP. ... On our trips, Che visited them and I noticed that he had an affinity with them. He also argued politics a lot with Father Sardiñas, who stayed awhile in our column. Che had a blue book, which was one of the selected works of Lenin, and he studied it frequently. I was curious and wanted to know who Lenin was and I asked him. He explained: ‘You know of José Martí, Antonio Maceo and Máximo Gómez’”—Cuba’s late-nineteenth-century national independence war heroes—“‘Lenin was like them. He fought for his people.’ It was the first time someone spoke to me of Lenin.”
The young fighters were blank slates upon whom Che made a lasting imprint. He personally taught Israel Pardo and Joel Iglesias, who were illiterate, how to read and write. And for Guile and some of the others, who had more education, he initiated daily study circles. The study material gradually evolved from Cuban history and military doctrine to politics and Marxism. When Joel had finally learned to read, Che gave him a biography of Lenin to study.
Just as he was circumspect about his political role during the war, Che made only oblique references to the early PSP–July 26 links in his later published writings. He sought to depict the revolution as evolving
naturally
toward socialism, an organic result of the Rebel Army’s life among the neglected peasants of the Sierra Maestra. “The guerrillas and the peasantry began to merge into a single mass, without our being able to say at what precise moment on the long revolutionary road this happened, or at which moment the words became profoundly real and we became a part of the peasantry,” he wrote in an article published in
Lunes de Revolución
, the literary supplement of
Revolución
, a newspaper founded during the guerrilla war and run by Carlos Franqui.
*
When he described the peasantry’s gradual acceptance of the revolution, Che employed religious symbolism, rendering their travails as a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress in which individuals found redemption through sacrifice, attaining final enlightenment by learning to live for the common good. “It is a new miracle of the revolution that—under the imperative of war—the staunchest individualist, who zealously protected the boundaries of his property and his own rights, joined the great common effort of the struggle. But there is an even greater miracle: the re-discovery by the Cuban peasant of his own happiness, within the liberated zones. Whoever witnessed the apprehensive murmurs with which our forces were formerly received in each peasant household notes with pride the carefree clamor, the happy, hearty laughter of the new Sierra inhabitant. That is a reflection of the self-confidence that the awareness of his own strength gave to the inhabitant of our liberated area.”
Che wrote this article, “War and the Peasantry,” only seven months after the war had ended. However consciously he had idealized life in the sierra for public consumption, his evocation of a pastoral utopia wrought through armed struggle was a vision he sought to replicate on an international scale. Most important of all, he identified war as the ideal circumstance in which to achieve a socialist consciousness. In essence, socialism was the natural order of mankind, and guerrilla war the chrysalis from which it would emerge.
By December 1957, Fidel had brought the war down from the Sierra Maestra. Rebel squads began trickling into the llano to launch harassment attacks, firing on garrisoned soldiers as far away as Manzanillo and burning cane trucks and passenger buses on the highway. The strategy expanded the war and diverted attention from the Sierra Maestra, where the rebels had consolidated their control. An uneasy standoff persisted into the new year, with the army mounting no new incursions and the rebels refraining from large-scale assaults.
In the relative calm, no one was more active than Che Guevara. At his new base of operations at La Mesa, facilities were built to replace those destroyed at El Hombrito, among them a butcher shop, a leather workshop, and even a cigar factory. (Che had become addicted to Cuban tobacco and, like Fidel, smoked cigars whenever they were available.) The leather workshop was to provide the troops with shoes, knapsacks, and cartridge belts. The first military cap produced was presented to Fidel and was greeted with raucous laughter. Unwittingly, Che had produced a cap almost identical to those worn by Cuban bus drivers. “The only one showing me any mercy was a municipal councillor from Manzanillo who was visiting ... and who took it back with him as a souvenir,” Che recalled.
Che gave top priority to the Rebel Army’s media projects.
El Cubano Libre
was now being printed on a new mimeograph machine, and a small radio transmitter had been installed. By February, Radio Rebelde was making its first broadcasts. He also put great effort into improving the quality and output of war matériel. Che was especially enthusiastic about the small M-26 “Sputnik” bombs. The first ones had been catapulted from the elastic bands of underwater spearguns. Later they were launched from rifles, but
the early models were little more than explosive slingshots—a bit of gunpowder packed into condensed milk tins. They made a huge and frightening noise but inflicted little damage, and before long the enemy learned to put up anti-Sputnik nets of wire mesh around their camps. In early 1958 the bombs had not yet been tested in battle, and Che had high hopes for their performance.
Meanwhile, Fidel made a curious overture to Batista. If the army was withdrawn from Oriente, Fidel told a go-between, he would agree to internationally supervised elections. His proposal coincided with an upsurge in public concern over sabotage by the rebels and atrocities by the police in the cities, and Fidel apparently wanted to give the impression that he too wanted peace. The would-be mediator duly carried the proposal to Havana, where the offer was so vehemently rejected that the messenger fled into exile.
The international press was beating a path to Fidel’s door. Cuba had become a big story, scrutinized in regular editorials by
The New York Times
and covered by the
Chicago Tribune
’s Latin American correspondent, Jules Dubois. In January and February, numerous reporters, including correspondents from
Paris Match
and various Latin American dailies, climbed to the sierra for interviews. Andrew St. George came back, and Fidel made suitably friendly declarations to him for his American audience. Fidel even wrote an article for
Coronet
, one of St. George’s media outlets, avowing that he was in favor of free enterprise and foreign investment, and against nationalization. The provisional government he envisioned as replacing Batista would be composed of Rotary Club members and other solidly middle-class professionals.
In January, the Movement suffered a potentially disastrous setback when Armando Hart and two other July 26 men were arrested after visiting Fidel. By all accounts, their captors were planning to execute them, but the American vice-consul (and CIA agent) in Santiago, Robert Wiecha, came to their rescue by getting Ambassador Smith to inquire about their fates. Unfortunately, Hart had been carrying a rather incriminating document when he was captured—a critical salvo he had written to Che in response to Che’s fiery missive to Daniel. He had addressed the issue of Che’s and Raúl’s Marxism as well as the dispute between the llano and the sierra. Fidel had seen the letter and ordered Hart not to send it, fearing that if the epistolary war continued, a letter would eventually fall into enemy hands and give Batista a new propaganda weapon to use against him. These fears had now been realized. Within days of Hart’s arrest, Rafael Díaz-Balart, Fidel’s former brother-in-law—who despised him passionately—cited the letter on a radio broadcast as evidence of Communist influence in Fidel’s organization.
The anti-Fidel propaganda campaign was squandered a few days later, however, when the army took twenty-three rebel suspects from the prison in Santiago to the sierra foothills and murdered them, then reported that they had been killed in battle, with no army casualties. Che wrote a scathing response in his column “Wild Shot” in
Cubano Libre
. After listing a number of other revolutionary wars occurring around the world, Che noted:
All of them have common characteristics: (A) The governing power “has inflicted numerous casualties on the rebels.” (B) There are no prisoners. (C) “Nothing new” [to report] by the governing power. (D) All the revolutionaries, whatever the name of the country or region, are receiving “surreptitious help from the Communists.”
How Cuban the world seems to us! Everything is the same. A group of patriots are murdered, whether or not they have arms, whether or not they are rebels, always after “a fierce fight” ..., they kill all the witnesses, that is why there are no prisoners. The government never suffers a casualty, which at times is true, because killing defenseless human beings is not very dangerous, but at times it is also a great lie; the Sierra Maestra is our unimpeachable witness.
And, finally, the same handy accusation as always: “Communists.” Communists are always those who pick up their arms tired of so much misery, wherever in the world the action takes place; democrats those who kill the indignant people, whether they be men, women, or children. How Cuban the world is! But everywhere, as in Cuba, the people will have the last word, that of victory, against brute force and injustice.
The slaughter of the Santiago prisoners caught the attention of the Cuban public but did not divert the scrutiny of Fidel by the United States. The revelations in Hart’s letter lent further credence to Ambassador Smith’s mounting suspicions about “Red” infiltration of the July 26 Movement. In January, Smith made a trip to Washington to make a case for keeping up arms deliveries to Batista, who had promised to restore constitutional guarantees and go through with the June elections if the United States didn’t cut him off. As for Castro, Smith told reporters, he did not trust him, and did not think the U.S. government was able to do business with him.
By early February, Che’s armory was racing to put the finishing touches on the Sputniks in preparation for the first major military action of the year. Fidel had decided to attack the sawmill community of Pino del Agua again. An army company had established a permanent presence there.
Batista had just lifted censorship everywhere except Oriente, and Fidel wanted to “strike a resounding blow” to earn some headlines.
The attack began at dawn on February 16. Fidel’s plan was to surround the army camp, destroy its guard posts, and then ambush reinforcements when they came. Che’s men brought along six Sputniks, to be fired at the beginning of the attack. Another of his armory’s creations, a land mine made from unexploded airplane bombs, was also given its first test. Mines were placed in a road that the army was expected to use. The Sputniks fired successfully but did little damage, and the land mines produced what Che called a “lamentable result.” Their first victim was a civilian truck driver who happened along at just the wrong moment.
The attack started well enough. The first wave of fighters overran the guard posts, killing half a dozen sentries and taking three prisoners, but the main body of soldiers quickly rallied, effectively stopping the rebels’ advance. Within minutes, four rebels were killed and two more were mortally wounded. Camilo Cienfuegos was wounded twice trying to rescue an abandoned machine gun.
The rebels had better luck against the army reinforcements. The first patrol walked directly into an ambush and was wiped out. But Che wanted to inflict a total defeat and begged Fidel to attack the entrenched enemy camp again, to completely overrun it this time. At his insistence, Fidel sent a couple of platoons to make another try, but they too were repelled under heavy fire. Che then asked Fidel for command of a new assault force; he would try to rout the soldiers by torching their camp. Grudgingly, Fidel let him go but warned him to take great care.
Just as he was preparing the advance, Che received a note from Fidel: “February 16, 1958. CHE: If everything depends on the attack from this side, without support from Camilo and Guillermo [García], I do not think anything suicidal should be done, because there is a risk of many casualties and failure to achieve the objective. I seriously urge you to be careful. You yourself are not to take part in the fighting. That is a strict order. Take charge of leading the men well; that is the most important thing right now. Fidel.”
Fidel knew that Che would probably not go forward with his plan if he couldn’t take part in the fighting himself—and he was right. “With all this responsibility weighing on my shoulders,” Che wrote later, “it was too much, and, crestfallen, I took the same path as my predecessor.” He ordered his men to withdraw. Later, speaking about Che’s recklessness in battle, Fidel mused that “In a way, he even violated the rules of combat—that is, the ideal
norms, the most perfect methods—risking his life in battle because of that character, tenacity, and spirit of his. ... Therefore, we had to lay down certain rules and guidelines for him to follow.”
The next morning, while government planes circled overhead, the rebels retreated into the hills, with five prisoners and forty new weapons. After they withdrew, the army apparently murdered thirteen peasants found hiding near the rebel positions. Denouncing this atrocity in
El Cubano Libre
, Che calculated the enemy losses at eighteen to twenty-two dead, but the army produced different statistics. An official dispatch claimed that “sixteen insurgents and five soldiers” had died in the battle but could not confirm reports that “the well-known Argentine Communist Che Guevara was wounded.” A paper in Havana reported that the attack had been led by “the international Communist agent known as ‘Che’ Guevara.”
The weeks following the battle at Pino del Agua saw increased rebel attacks throughout the country. On February 23, in one of the most spectacular publicity coups carried out by the Movement so far, a July 26 unit kidnapped Juan Manuel Fangio, a world-famous Argentine race-car driver who was in Havana to compete in an international championship. Later released unharmed, Fangio declared that his kidnapping had been “friendly,” his treatment “warm and cordial.”