Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
La Otilia may have remained unscathed, but its approaches were a dangerous free-fire zone. One night, returning to base from a visit with Fidel, Che and his guide came upon a chilling scene. “In this last leg of the trip, already near the house, a strange spectacle presented itself by the light of a full moon that clearly illuminated the surroundings: in one of those rolling fields, with scattered palm trees, there appeared a row of dead mules, some with their harnesses on. When we got down from our horses to examine the first mule and saw the bullet holes, the guide’s expression as he looked at me was an image out of a cowboy movie. The hero of the film arrives with his partner and sees a horse killed by an arrow. He says something like, ‘The Sioux,’ and makes a special face for the occasion. That’s what the man’s face was like and perhaps my own as well, although I did not bother to look at myself. A few meters farther on was the second, then the third, then the
fourth or fifth dead mule. It had been a convoy of supplies for us, captured by one of Sánchez Mosquera’s expeditions. I seem to recall that a civilian was also murdered. The guide refused to follow me. He claimed he did not know the terrain and simply got on his mount. We separated amicably.”
Within a few weeks of setting up camp at La Otilia, Che received new orders. In preparation for the army invasion, which appeared more imminent by the day, Fidel wanted Che to take direct charge of the recruit training school at Minas del Frío; a large number of new volunteers had assembled there, and they were to provide the backbone of a new command that was to undertake a risky crossing of the island as soon as they were ready and conditions were right. Taking charge of Che’s column in the line against Sánchez Mosquera would be his deputy, Ramiro Valdés.
As a safeguard, Fidel also wanted to consolidate the Rebel Army’s infrastructure. Radio Rebelde and
El Cubano Libre
were moved from La Mesa to his command base at La Plata. With its hospitals, electric generators, and munition stores, La Plata was a vital nerve center the rebels could not afford to lose, and it was to be the last line of defense. Food and medicine had to be brought and stockpiled for what could be a long siege.
Feeling fretful, Che set off to assume his new duties accompanied by a small handpicked group of fighters. His diary reflected his dampened mood: “We left at dawn, me with low spirits, for having to abandon a zone that I had under my control for nearly a year, and in really critical moments, because Sánchez Mosquera’s troops are coming up with more enthusiasm.”
Fidel’s new orders had also dashed Che’s hopes of joining Camilo Cienfuegos on the expanded war front of the llano. When Camilo learned of Che’s reassignment, he wrote a note to console him: “Che. Soul brother: I see Fidel has put you in charge of the Military School, which makes me very happy because now we can count on having first-class soldiers in the future. ... You’ve played a very principal role in this showdown and if we need you in this insurrectional stage, Cuba needs you even more when the war ends, so the Giant [Fidel] does a good thing in looking after you. I would like to be always at your side, you were my chief for a long time and you will always continue to be. Thanks to you I now have the opportunity to be more useful. I’ll do the unspeakable to not make you look bad. Your eternal
chicharrón
, Camilo.”
For the rest of April, Che was constantly on the move. Together with some pilots now working for the rebels, he searched for a good site to build an airstrip and found one near La Plata. He left men in charge of clearing the
brush and digging a tunnel in which to hide the planes from view. He inspected the work under way at the unfinished recruits’ school at Minas del Frío and met every few days with Fidel.
As Batista’s grip weakened, the Byzantine jockeying of the opposition increased. Given Fidel’s prominence and moral authority, a succession of groups attempted to curry favor with him while simultaneously trying to undermine his position. Justo Carrillo, the exiled leader of a failed 1956 military uprising, who still had deep connections in the Cuban army, offered Fidel military support in return for a manifesto “eulogizing” the armed forces. Although Fidel was interested in winning over sectors of the armed forces, he also saw the danger of being outfoxed. A coup organized by Carrillo, together with his imprisoned coconspirator, Colonel Ramón Barquín, would probably appeal to the Cuban business community, traditional political parties, and Washington. Carrillo could then simply turn against Fidel.
Perhaps the greatest threat to Fidel’s power, however, was to be found within his own July 26 Movement. With the embarrassing failure of the general strike, Fidel had the ammunition he needed to move against the National Directorate leaders, and he summoned them to Altos de Mompié. Che played a principal role in a dramatic showdown on May 3. “I made a small analysis of the situation,” Che wrote in his diary, “setting forth the reality of two antagonistic policies, that of the Sierra and that of the Llano, the validity of the Sierra’s policies and our correctness in fearing for the success of the strike.” He blamed the llano leaders’ “sectarianism” in blocking the PSP’s involvement, which had doomed the strike before it even started. “I gave my opinion that the greatest responsibility fell upon the chief of the workers, on the top leader of the llano militia brigades and on the chief for Havana, that is to say Mario [David Salvador], Daniel, and Faustino. So they should resign.”
After a heated debate that lasted into the evening, Fidel put Che’s proposals to a vote, and the measures passed. The result was a total revamping of the llano leadership, with Faustino, Daniel, and David Salvador dismissed from their posts and transferred to the Sierra Maestra. The most important change of all was that the National Directorate itself would be moved to the Sierra Maestra. Fidel was now the general secretary, with sole authority over foreign affairs and arms supply, as well as commander in chief of the Movement’s nationwide network of underground militias. A five-member secretariat would serve under him, dealing with finances, political affairs, and workers’ issues; and the July 26 office in Santiago, once the Oriente headquarters, would now be a mere outpost, a “delegation” answerable to the general secretary.
In “A Decisive Meeting,” which Che wrote for the armed forces magazine
Verde Olivo
in late 1964, he summed up the achievements of that fateful day: “At this meeting decisions were taken that confirmed Fidel’s moral authority, his indisputable stature, and the conviction among the majority of revolutionaries present that errors of judgment had been committed. ... But most important, the meeting discussed and passed judgment on two conceptions that had clashed with one another throughout the whole previous stage of directing the war. The guerrilla conception would emerge triumphant from that meeting. Fidel’s standing and authority were consolidated. ... There now arose only one authoritative leadership, the Sierra, and concretely one single leader, one commander in chief, Fidel Castro.”
*
If others had been concerned about Fidel’s caudillismo, it was now a moot point. It had never been a problem for Che. He had always thought ahead to the day when the
true
revolution would be built, and he believed that only a strongman could do it. From now on, the road forward was clear.
Che had little time to savor the victory. Already, the army had begun to make moves in its summer offensive, positioning troops along the flanks of the mountains and reinforcing the garrisons along the coast. Ambush positions had to be selected, trenches dug, and supply and fallback routes worked out, all within a coordinated plan of action. To the west, in the hills around Pico Caracas, Crescencio Pérez would have to hold the line with his “small and poorly armed groups,” while Ramiro Valdés was to hold the land around La Botella and La Mesa to the east. A huge responsibility was resting on Che’s shoulders, and he kept up a frenetic pace of activity to meet it. “This small territory had to be defended, with not much more than two hundred functioning rifles, when a few days later Batista’s army began its ‘encirclement and annihilation’ offensive.”
An air of crisis pervaded the sierra, with daily reports and rumors of enemy troops closing in. On May 6, the army occupied two rice farms at the edge of the sierra and took a rebel prisoner. On May 8, more troops disembarked at two points along the coast. On May 10, La Plata was bombed from the air and from the sea. Che rushed from one place to the other, moving or reinforcing rebel positions according to the latest intelligence. He also carried out nonmilitary missions. He pushed the agrarian reform program forward
and attempted to collect taxes from Oriente landowners and planters. Fidel wanted to get in as much money as he could to help sustain the Rebel Army during the offensive, but Che found the plantation owners recalcitrant. “Later,” he wrote in his diary, “when our strength was solid, we got even.”
With recruits from the school at Minas del Frío, Che formed a new column, Number Eight, named in honor of his late comrade Ciro Redondo. The recruits had been trained by a volunteer weapons instructor, an American Korean War veteran named Herman Marks. Fidel, meanwhile, was quite clearly alarmed about the ability of his forces to withstand the invasion, and had begun hatching schemes that verged on the apocalyptic. On April 26, he had written to Celia Sánchez: “I need
cyanide
. Do you know any way to obtain it in some quantity? But we also need
strychnine
—as much of it as possible. We must get these very circumspectly, for if word leaks out, it will be of no use. I have some surprises in store for the time the offensive hits us.” Whether or not Fidel obtained the poisons, or what he planned to do with them, is unknown. Presumably he planned to poison the water supplies in his camps if they were overrun. In the grip of this bunker mentality, he sent an urgent note to Che, who was inspecting the frontline defenses, and ordered him back to headquarters.
Che drove back in a jeep with Oscar “Oscarito” Fernández Mell, a twenty-five-year-old doctor who had just left Havana to join the rebels. With Che in the driver’s seat, they traveled at breakneck speeds along a narrow dirt road that skirted steep precipices. Oscarito was visibly nervous, and Che told him not to worry, adding, “When we get to where we’re going, I want to tell you something.” Oscarito was later duly informed that Che had never driven before. With his old sidekick, Alberto Granado, he had learned to drive a motorbike, but he had never sat behind the wheel of a car.
While Che waited for Fidel to return from an inspection of the coastal front, his most trusted courier, Lidia Doce Sánchez, went on a mission to make contact with “friends” in Havana, Camagüey, and Manzanillo. Lidia was a woman in her mid-forties who had left her bakery in San Pedro de Yao to accompany the rebel force after her only son joined up. She carried the most compromising rebel communiqués and documents into and out of the Sierra Maestra and to Havana and Santiago. These were highly dangerous assignments that involved repeatedly crossing enemy lines and would have meant torture and almost certain death if she were caught. On this mission, she would have to exit the sierra at a place where there was a
guardia
presence.
Lidia was to become one of Che’s most exalted revolutionary personalities, an examplar of self-sacrifice, honesty, and bravery. Che repaid her loyalty by leaving her in command of an auxiliary camp situated close to
enemy lines. The camp became increasingly dangerous, and several times he had tried to pull her out, but Lidia refused to leave. Che wrote that she led the camp “with spirit and a touch of high-handedness, causing a certain resentment among the Cuban men under her command, who were not accustomed to taking orders from a woman.” Only when Che was transferred did she agree to leave the camp, in order to follow him.
Che waited for Fidel to return to headquarters for several days, from May 15 to May 18. During this time, he played host to a number of visitors. His journal entries are vague but they indicate that he was fielding overtures from a number of political groups, including the Communist Party. The most significant visit was from someone he described only as “Rafael, an old acquaintance,” and a PSP man named Lino. By May 19, the other visitors had left, but the PSP men stayed on to meet with Fidel. Then the journalist José Ricardo Masetti unexpectedly reappeared in camp, having come back to the sierra for another interview with Fidel. His arrival meant a further delay in Fidel’s meeting with the Communists, for, as Che noted in his diary, “it isn’t convenient that he [Masetti] hears anything.”
On May 22, with Masetti finally gone, the summit between the PSP and Fidel got under way. Rafael and Lino carried a proposal for a united front of revolutionary forces but also conveyed the Party’s enduring doubts over the “negative attitude” of the National Directorate. Fidel accepted the idea of a union “in principle,” Che wrote, “but he put up some reservations about the forms without ending the discussion.” The paramount item on Fidel’s agenda was to beat back the unfolding enemy offensive, and although a unity of forces on the llano was desirable, it was not essential at the moment. He hoped to avoid a protracted and bloody showdown with the armed forces, and the way to do that was by breaking their morale in the sierra; then he would sweep down onto the llano, and political alliances would be his for the asking. As always, Fidel’s fear of American intervention on Batista’s behalf dictated that he continue his go-slow policy with the Communist Party.
There were certainly signs that this fear was not misplaced. In spite of the State Department’s suspension of arms shipments to Batista, the Defense Department had just delivered 300 rockets to the Cuban air force from its stocks at the American base at Guantánamo. Fueling Fidel’s suspicions that Trujillo and Somoza were working as U.S. proxies to provide Batista with war matériel, a ship from Nicaragua had arrived with thirty tanks in early May.
If anything, U.S. concern about Fidel’s true political sentiments had grown over the past few months. In May, Jules Dubois, the
Chicago Tribune
’s correspondent, used Radio Rebelde’s newly boosted transmitter links with
the outside world to conduct an interview with Fidel from Caracas; his main line of inquiry centered on charges linking Fidel to the Communists. Fidel accused Batista of spreading the rumor in order to obtain U.S. arms, and denied any intention of nationalizing industry or the private business sector. He had no presidential aspirations of his own, Fidel explained. But the July 26 Movement would become a political party after the revolution, to “fight with the arms of the Constitution and of the law.”