Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
There was a growing gulf between Fidel’s public reassurances and his private thoughts. On June 5, shortly after the first American-supplied rockets were used by Batista’s air force in the Sierra Maestra, hitting a civilian’s home, he wrote to Celia Sánchez, “When I saw the rockets that they fired on Mario’s house, I swore that the Americans are going to pay dearly for what they’re doing. When this war is over, I’ll start a much longer and bigger war of my own: the war I’m going to fight against them. I realize that will be my true destiny.”
In the short term, Fidel waged a campaign to win over key military officers, writing a flattering note to General Eulogio Cantillo, the commander of the Havana military headquarters. At the same time, he was trying to undermine the confidence of the army troops massed in the sierra. “The armed forces are now facing a very difficult task,” he claimed in a statement to the Venezuelan press. “Every entrance to the Sierra Maestra is like the pass at Thermopylae, and every narrow passage becomes a death trap. The Cuban army has lately begun to realize that it has been led into a real war, an absurd war, a meaningless war, which can cost it thousands of lives, a war that is not theirs, because after all, we are not at war against the armed forces but against the dictatorship. These circumstances always have led inevitably to a military rebellion.”
Fidel’s daily activities had become increasingly administrative and sedentary. “I’m tired of the role of overseer and going back and forth without a minute’s rest, to have to attend to the most insignificant details, just because someone forgot this or overlooked that,” he wrote to Celia. “I miss those early days when I was really a soldier, and I felt much happier than I do now. This struggle becomes a miserable, petty bureaucratic task for me.” But, for all his complaints, it was Fidel’s nature to take control. He both plotted the overall strategy of the war and obsessed over the tiniest and most mundane details. In between the orders for blasting caps and rifle grease, he hounded Celia to provide him with personal comforts he missed. “I need a fountain pen,” he wrote one day. “I hate being without one.” On May 8, he had carped, “I’m eating hideously. No care is paid to preparing my food. ... I’m in a terrible mood.” By May 17, the list of complaints had expanded: “I have no tobacco, I have no wine, I have nothing. A bottle of rosé
wine, sweet and Spanish, was left in Bismarck’s house, in the refrigerator. Where is it?”
Fidel lacked faith in the judgment and decision-making of virtually all his subordinates except Che, who had become his chief confidant as well as his de facto military chief of staff. When they were apart, he kept up a constant stream of notes to Che, confiding military plans, financial matters, and political machinations, and, like an enthusiastic youth, recounting experiments with new weapons from the armory. “It’s been too many days since we’ve talked,” he had written to Che in early May, “and that’s a matter of necessity between us. I miss the old comrades here. Yesterday I carried out an experiment with a tin grenade that produced terrific results. I hung it from a tree branch about 6 feet from the ground and set it off. It showered lethal fragments in all directions. It sends fragments downward and on all sides, as if it were a sprinkler. I think that in open terrain it could kill you at 50 yards.”
During the third week of May, the government troops began their initial probes of rebel territory. General Cantillo had a total of fourteen battalions for his assault on the sierra, in addition to the support of the air force, and artillery and tank regiments. Cantillo’s plan was to drive into the sierra from several points, gradually surrounding the rebels and reducing their territory until he could attack and destroy Fidel at his La Plata
comandancia
on the central ridge of the Sierra Maestra.
To the south, the coastal garrisons had been reinforced, and naval frigates stood ready to provide artillery support and seal off escape in that direction. To the north, flanking the western and eastern limits of rebel territory, Cantillo had deployed two army units composed of two battalions each. A few miles north of Las Mercedes, which was held by Crescencio’s column, an army company led by Major Raúl Corzo Izaguirre had assembled at the sugar
central
of Estrada Palma. To the east, at Bueycito, a company under Sánchez Mosquera, who was now a lieutenant colonel, was prepared to enter the hills that were held by Che’s old column, led by Ramiro Valdés. If Cantillo had one weakness, it was the unreadiness of his men: of 10,000 troops, only a third were experienced soldiers; the rest were conscripts recently called up for the occasion. But if all went according to plan, the rebels would simply be squeezed into an ever-tightening circle.
This circle was never that wide to begin with. The entire rebel stronghold, with its precious installations at La Plata, Las Vegas de Jibacoa, Mompié, and Minas del Frío, was actually only a tiny area of a few square miles. The distance between Fidel’s
comandancia
and the northern front-line village of Las Mercedes was a little over seven miles, and the recruits’ school at Minas del Frío sat halfway between them. To the south, less than
five miles from rebel headquarters, lay the coast. Fidel counted on about 280 armed fighters, with approximately fifty bullets apiece, to defend his mountain fastness.
On May 19, after an aerial barrage to soften up the rebel defenses, Corzo Izaguirre’s troops tried to march on Las Mercedes, but Crescencio’s units held the line just beyond its outskirts. The battle lines were drawn, with the two sides facing off at a distance of less than a quarter mile. But even as his communiqués trumpeted the “stout resistance” displayed by his fighters and a brief quiet settled on the battlefront, Fidel was privately worried about Crescencio’s abilities as a leader; a few days later, he asked Che to go to Las Mercedes and assume command.
Before leaving, Che attended an almost surreal assembly called by Humberto Sorí-Marín with the area’s peasants to discuss how to carry out the coffee harvest. Surprisingly, 350 farmers showed up. Although it passed completely unnoticed by the outside world, it was an important moment. This was the first practical step in the agrarian reform process undertaken by the Cuban revolution. Che watched the proceedings with keen interest. He wrote that “the steering committee, which included Fidel, proposed that the following measures be adopted: to create a type of Sierra currency to pay the workers, to bring the straw and sacking for the packing, to create a work and consumer cooperative, to create a commission to supervise the work and provide troops to help in the coffee picking. Everything was approved, but when Fidel was going to close the ceremony with his speech the planes started to machine-gun in the zone of Las Mercedes and the people lost interest.” It was May 25. The enemy offensive had begun in earnest. Che rushed to Las Mercedes, and for the next three months, he was rarely still as he rallied rebel defenses to resist the overwhelming firepower and troop strength of Batista’s invading army. When his courier Lidia arrived and informed him that Faustino Pérez, who was in Havana with orders to hand over his post, was balking, Che observed in his diary that “the thing looks worse all the time.” But he could do no more than register the news.
As always, there were disciplinary problems with recruits trying to escape the tightening army net. Once when Fidel was visiting Las Mercedes, a recruit who had escaped was captured and brought in. “Fidel wanted to shoot him immediately,” Che noted in his journal, “but I opposed it and in the end the thesis of condemning him to indefinite reclusion at [the rebel prison of] Puerto Malanga triumphed.” A few days later, in a demonstration of the often arbitrary nature of Fidel’s application of revolutionary justice, he absolved a deserter.
For all of Fidel’s rhetoric about turning the mountain passes into death traps for the army, Che’s diary reveals just how undermanned the
rebels really were, and how tenuous their morale was.
*
With enemy troops disembarking on the coast, Fidel took charge of the defense of Las Vegas and sent Che to put order into Crescencio Pérez’s command, where one of the officers was reportedly acting abusively toward his men. Before leaving, Che held a summary trial for a rebel officer accused of murder and sentenced him to death. Che spent his thirtieth birthday sitting in judgment of Crescencio’s officer, whom he decided to strip of his command. Returning to the front, he found it in disarray, with army troops advancing on all fronts. Fidel had moved on to Mompié; Las Vegas had been overrun. Minas del Frío was now threatened, and Che spent several days shoring up Fidel’s front with his own men, building new defensive lines, stripping another officer of his command, and disarming others who had been insubordinate.
On June 26, he met up with Fidel again at Mompié, and Fidel ordered him to stay with him for the moment. The outlook was grim; the rebels were ceding ground everywhere. Fidel had ordered Camilo and Almeida to bring their columns back to the sierra to help out, but a defeatist attitude had begun to permeate the rebel ranks. “In the night there were three escapes,” Che wrote the next day. “One of them was double; Rosabal, condemned to death for being a
chivato
, Pedro Guerra from Sori’s squad, and two military prisoners. Pedro Guerra was captured; he had stolen a revolver for the escape. He was executed immediately.”
By the end of June, the rebels had their first clear victory. An army company under Sánchez Mosquera had been turned back, and the rebels captured twenty-two soldiers and fifty or sixty weapons. But elsewhere the army was on the move, with reports flowing in of enemy advances on La Maestra and other hills in the area. The second wave of the offensive had begun. Hearing of soldiers advancing to take the heights of Altos de Merino, Che rushed over there on the morning of July 3. “Upon arriving I found that the guards were already advancing. A little combat broke out in which we retreated very quickly. The position was bad and they were
encircling us, but we put up little resistance. Personally I noted something I had never felt before: the need to live. That had better be corrected in the next opportunity.”
It is hard to imagine many other men in the same situation making this sort of critical self-judgment, but this was how Ernesto Guevara, in his new identity as Che, now confronted life. It was one of the facets of his character that set him apart from the vast majority of his guerrilla comrades, who, even as they fought, still hoped to survive the experience. Indeed, most of the problems he encountered on a daily basis with his men pointed up this fundamental difference between them. Their nervousness, their lack of “combativity,” the desertions, not being where they should on the front line—all the complaints and observations that peppered his daily journal came down to the same complaint: they felt “
the need to live
.”
On the eve of battle, Che had used the new radio-communication links from the Sierra Maestra to call his mother, and she wrote back to wish him a happy thirtieth birthday.
Dear Teté:
I was so overcome to hear your voice after so much time. I didn’t recognize it—you seemed to be another person. Maybe the line was bad or maybe you have changed. Only when you said “old lady” did it seem like the voice of old. What wonderful news you gave me. What a pity the communication was cut before I could give you mine. And there is a lot to tell. Ana [María, Che’s youngest sister] was married on April 2 to Petít [Fernando Chávez] and they went to Vienna. ... What a thing all of my children leaving! She left behind a very big emptiness in the house. ... Roberto has two beautiful blond daughters who will be two and one on the first of July, and the [male] heir is expected in August. He is working hard and well to maintain his numerous family. ...
Celia has just won an important [architectural] prize together with Luis [Argañaraz, her fiancé] and Petít. Between the three of them they get 2 and ½ million pesos. I am so proud of having such capable children that I don’t fit in my clothes. Juan Martín, of course, [now] fits into your clothes. It isn’t that he’s tall. He’s as puny as his brothers and sisters were and he is still an enchanting child. Life is not going to knock this one around.
María Luisa [Che’s aunt] is the same as before. Physically and emotionally incapacitated and very sad. It seems a characteristic of her illness. She always asks about you. ... I too am the same. With a few years more and a sadness that is no longer so sharp. It has turned into a chronic sadness, blended once in a while with great satisfactions. The prize won by Celia was one of them, the return of the Little One will be another, hearing your voice was a very big one. I have become very solitary. I don’t know how to write you, or even what to say to you: I have lost the measure.
The housework tires me out a lot. For a long time now I have been my own cook and you know how I detest the chores of the home. The kitchen is my headquarters and there I spend most of my time. There was a big blowup with the old man [Che’s father] and he no longer comes around. My companions are Celia, Luis, and Juan Martín. So many things I wanted to say, my dear. I am afraid to let them out. I leave them to your imagination.
A hug and a long kiss of years, with all my love, Celia.
One wonders how Che reacted to this poignant letter. Did he read it with emotional detachment or suffer pangs of yearning for the normal life that continued in his absence: brothers and sisters growing up, getting married, leaving home and having children; his parents growing older? And what of his own family—his wife, Hilda, and their daughter, Hildita? But more than Teté’s voice had changed. He had made a conscious choice to divorce himself from his “outside” life. He seldom wrote to Hilda or his parents, although he had opportunities to do so. In late April, Fidel had told him that someone in Peru, presumably Hilda, had tried to call him on the radio; evidently Che did not phone back, for Hilda makes no mention of it in her memoirs. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of his diary of the time is the almost total lack of personal details or introspection, especially compared with the self-absorption of the vagabond Ernesto just a few short years before.