Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Masetti’s visit increased the Guevara family’s feeling of vicarious celebrity. They listened to the recording their son’s latest admirer had brought them, and the broadcasts of Che’s interviews on Radio El Mundo. After their first visits, Masetti and Gutiérrez became frequent visitors and family friends, and, infected by their enthusiasm, Ernesto senior embraced the Cuban revolution with fervor. “The defense of the Cuban Revolution entrapped us all,” he wrote. “My house on Calle Araoz turned into a revolutionary center.” He rented another studio near his office and turned it into a branch of the local July 26 support committee and, in a move reminiscent of his work during the Spanish Civil War and World War II, founded a “Comité de Ayuda a Cuba,” which held dances and sold bonds to raise funds.
Hilda had become the official representative of the July 26 Movement in Peru. July 26 chapters had been set up throughout Latin America and the United States, raising funds, advertising the aims of the Movement, and disseminating information to the press. “I worked, complying with instructions sent me by the committee, on propaganda and money collection,” Hilda wrote. With some members from the leftist wing of APRA, which she had rejoined, she founded a support group to help Cuban exiles seeking refuge in Peru. Yet, for all her political activity, Hilda’s reminiscences of the period have a certain scolding quality. “Letters came from time to time from Ernesto. Only a few of mine managed to reach him, however, although I followed his instructions. ... When Hildita was two years old, February 15, 1958, I wrote Ernesto and asked him to authorize my coming to the mountains of Cuba, to be with him and help; the child was then old enough to be cared for either by my family or his. His reply took four or five months to arrive. He said I couldn’t come yet; the fight was at a dangerous stage, and an offensive would begin in which he himself would not remain in any one place.”
There was another reason why Hilda’s presence in the Sierra Maestra would not be opportune. In the spring of 1958, Che had taken a lover, a young
guajira
named Zoila Rodríguez. Che’s adolescent protégé, Joel
Iglesias, observed the lightning courtship. “In Las Vegas de Jibacoa, Che met a black girl, or better said a
mulata
, with a really beautiful body, called Zoila, and he liked her a lot,” Iglesias said. “A lot of women went crazy over him, but he was always very strict and respectful in that sense ... but he liked
that
girl. They hooked up and were together for a time.”
Zoila was a single mother of eighteen and still living on her father’s farm when she met Che. “It was about four in the afternoon of a date I can’t remember,” she reminisced years later. “I was corralling some cows when he came. He was mounted on a mule. ... He was dressed in a strange green uniform, with a black beret.” He had come to see if her father, a rebel collaborator, could shoe his mule; with her father away, Zoila offered to do it for him. “As I shoed the mule, I looked at him sideways and I realized he was observing me, but he was looking at me in the way boys look at girls and I got really nervous. When I went to the box of irons to choose a rasp, he asked me what I was going to do and I explained that I had cut the hooves and now I had to level them off to mount the shoes. Guevara said was it really necessary to make them so beautiful. I said that’s the way it had to be. He kept looking at me in that way ... a stare a little bit naughty, like he wanted to scold me for something I hadn’t done.”
When Zoila had finished shoeing the mule she offered Che coffee. As he drank it he asked Zoila about herself. Where had she learned how to shoe mules? Was she married or single? “He impressed me a lot,” Zoila recalled. “The truth is that, and I can’t deny it, as a woman I liked him very much, above all his stare, he had such beautiful eyes, a smile so calm that it would move any heart, it could move any woman.”
When Zoila’s father returned home, he explained to her in admiring tones that Guevara was an extraordinary man who had come to lift them from their misery and disgrace. Soon afterward, Zoila began to carry out small errands for the rebels, meeting Che occasionally, until one day he asked her to stay on permanently at Minas del Frío. She helped out in the kitchen and in the hospital, and she worked hard. “He told me he admired me for that and he admired the peasants for the difficult work we had to do,” Zoila recalled. “He asked me many things about the Sierra Maestra, how the plants were called, what were they good for, especially the medicinal ones. ... He wanted to know all about the animals and the birds of the bush. A great and beautiful love arose in me and I committed myself to him, not just as a fighter but as a woman.”
For the next several months, Zoila stayed by Che’s side. Interestingly, he doesn’t appear to have tried to educate her politically. Zoila remembered one day when she saw one of his books and was amazed at the sight of its golden letters. “I asked him if they were made of gold. He thought the question was
funny. He laughed, and he said: ‘That book is about Communism.’ I was too shy to ask him what Communism meant, because I had never heard that word before.”
In March 1958, Fidel Castro faced a potential new roadblock in his path to power: a peace initiative. The Catholic Church had called for an end to rebel violence and the creation of a national unity government. A “harmony commission” made up of conservative politicians, businessmen, and a priest was created to mediate. Batista went through the motions of seeming receptive, but Fidel rejected the commission as overly pro-Batista. This was risky, since there was growing public support for a negotiated settlement, and Fidel could be viewed as an impediment. But at a crucial moment, Batista gave him a way out.
The catalyst was provided when a judge in Havana indicted two of Batista’s most notorious henchmen for murder. Batista responded by again suspending constitutional guarantees and throwing out the indictment. The offending judge fled the country and the United States suspended arms shipments to Cuba. In the face of Washington’s disapproval, increased rebel sabotage, and mounting calls for his resignation by Cuban civic institutions, Batista compounded his problems by postponing the scheduled June elections until November. Fidel—whose firepower had been reinforced by a planeload of weapons flown directly on a C-47 transport from Costa Rica to a rendezvous point near Estrada Palma—met with his National Directorate (minus Armando Hart, who was imprisoned on the Isle of Pines and would remain there until the rebels’ victory).
*
On March 12, they signed a manifesto calling for preparations to begin for the long-planned general strike and for “total war” against the regime.
The goal was nothing less than a complete paralysis of the nation. As of April 1, no taxes were to be paid; by April 5, anyone remaining in the
executive branch of government would be considered a traitor, and those joining the armed forces were to be considered criminals. Judges should resign their offices. When the strike call was announced over the radio, the rebels would launch armed attacks in Havana and throughout the country. While Faustino Pérez, who had recently been released from prison, organized the strikes in Havana, Fidel would prepare his army for what he hoped would be a full-scale insurrection.
Eager to be involved, the Communist Party of Cuba, the PSP, ordered its own militants to begin organizing for action, but once again the conservative llano leaders of the National Directorate blocked their involvement. Even after the PSP had sent an emissary to Fidel to plead its case, and Fidel responded by ordering the movement to allow “all Cuban workers, no matter what their political or revolutionary affiliations,” to participate in the strike committees, the llano leaders studiously excluded the Communists.
The strike call came on April 9, and it was a catastrophe. The Confederación de Trabajadores Cubanos, which was controlled by Batista, and the disenfranchised PSP ignored it. Most shops and factories in Havana remained open, and the key sectors of electricity and transport were unaffected. The strike also fizzled in Santiago, and by the end of the day as many as thirty people lay dead at the hands of police and Rolando Masferrer’s death squads. As for the other decrees for resignations and nonpayment of taxes, they were scarcely heeded. Nonethless, Fidel put a brave face on things, and in a broadcast on April 10 thundered, “All Cuba burns and erupts in an explosion of anger against the assassins, the bandits and gangsters, the informers and strikebreakers, the thugs and military still loyal to Batista.”
But for all of Fidel’s face-saving rhetoric, the failure of the strike had been a severe blow to the rebel cause. “The strike experience involved a great moral rout for the Movement,” Fidel wrote to Celia Sánchez on April 16, “but I hope that we’ll be able to regain the people’s faith in us. The Revolution is once again in danger and its salvation rests in our hands.” If Fidel’s pride had been hurt, his ego was essentially undamaged. “We cannot continue to disappoint the nation. There are many things we must do, do them well and on a grand scale; and I will do them. Time will justify me one day.”
Fidel blamed the llano leadership for the failure of the strike, and the Communists blamed the July 26 Movement generally for “adventurism.” The fiasco was a boon for Batista. His old enemy in the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, sent him five planeloads of war matériel; and with a notable drop-off in rebel activity after the strike, Batista began drawing up ambitious plans to launch a summer offensive for liquidating Fidel’s insurgency once and for all.
Fidel’s ill-disguised appeal for “workers’ unity” was fresh evidence that the Communists and Castro were getting cozy. Indeed, the PSP had suddenly become rather public in its support of the rebel movement. In February, the National Committee of the PSP had issued a document stating that “in spite of the radical discrepancies it has with the tactics of the
‘26 de Julio’
in the rest of the territory of the country, [the Party] justifies and comprehends the guerrilla action in the Sierra Maestra.” On March 12, an article titled “Why Our Party Supports the Sierra Maestra” was published in the Party’s weekly bulletin,
Carta Semanal
. “We don’t limit ourselves to view with sympathy the activity of the forces in arms commanded by Fidel Castro, ‘Che’ Guevara, and others,” the article asserted. “We adopt the position of supporting actively, in all of the guerrilla zone, the troops who fight against the [Batista] tyranny. ... In addition to trying to aid the activities of the patriotic forces that operate in the Sierra Maestra, we are trying to push forward the links between the guerrilla action and the class struggle in all the neighboring zone.”
Even today, most surviving former Soviet officials of the period adhere to the official dogma that Soviet leaders were largely ignorant of events in Cuba and that the rebel victory in January 1959 caught them by surprise, but such claims fly in the face of an abundance of contrary evidence. For a start, the Soviets had already had direct contacts with Che and Raúl Castro in Mexico, where the Soviet Union maintained an important embassy, and where its officials kept in touch with leaders of the region’s Communist parties, including the Cuban PSP. And while old Latin American Communists bristle at the notion that they were minions of Moscow, the fact is that most of the regional Communist parties of the day depended on Moscow for subsidies as well as policy directives. It would appear unlikely almost to the point of absurdity that the Soviets remained unaware of the Cuban Party’s moves toward an alliance with Fidel Castro’s revolution in the spring of 1958. What
is
certain is that by early 1958, more Communists had begun joining the Rebel Army, in particular Che’s and Raúl’s columns.
Meanwhile, Fidel was preparing to deal a masterstroke against the Movement in the llano. The failure of the general strike had painfully borne out the leadership’s weaknesses, and it gave Fidel a new position of strength from which to assert direct control over the entire Movement. He told Celia Sánchez at the time, “No one will ever be able to make me trust the organization again. ... I am the supposed leader of this Movement, and in the eyes of history I must take the responsibility for the stupidity of others. ... With the excuse of fighting caudillismo, each one attempts to do more and more what he feels like doing. I am not such a fool that I don’t realize this, nor am I a man given to seeing visions and phantoms.”
On April 16, after Camilo Cienfuego’s column had returned to the sierra from a brief foray onto the plains, Fidel named him military chief of the triangle of land between Bayamo, Manzanillo, and Las Tunas, with orders to coordinate all guerrilla activities in the region. He was to take over command of sabotage and supply in those cities, to carry out agrarian reform, and “to modify the civil code”—extending Fidel’s revolutionary writ from the Sierra Maestra to the llano. Fidel’s rebels could now, theoretically, strike anywhere in Oriente, but before he could give real teeth to his new plan, Fidel realized he was going to have to dig in and defend the Sierra Maestra. It was clear that Batista planned to launch a major army offensive.
In mid-April, Fidel and Che moved from their bases at La Plata and La Mesa to the northeast foothills. Fidel set up his command headquarters at El Jíbaro, while Che’s unit was a day’s march away, near the village of Minas de Bueycito, where Sánchez Mosquera had quartered his troops. Che’s mission was to hold the rebel front line against army penetration, and he based himself in a commandeered landowner’s house in a place called La Otilia, a little over a mile from the enemy base. Neither side seemed eager to risk a decisive battle. At night the rebels fired their M-26 bombs, and their patrols routinely skirmished with the army, but Sánchez Mosquera’s main activity took the form of reprisals against civilians in the area, burning and looting homes and killing people suspected of collaborating with the rebels. For some reason, La Otilia was not attacked.
“I have never been able to find out why Sánchez Mosquera allowed us to be comfortably settled in a house,” Che wrote later, “in a relatively flat area with little vegetation, without calling the enemy air force to attack us. Our guess was that he was not interested in fighting and that he did not want to let the air force see how close his troops were, because he would then have to explain why he did not attack.”