Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
The Cuban army had not taken fully into account the topography of their battlefield. Army units quickly bogged down or lost contact with one another in the Sierra Maestra’s thick forests and deep ravines. The rebels gave ground when necessary and then encircled isolated army units. It was soon the rebels who were on the offensive.
To press their advantage, Che and Fidel split their forces again. Fidel set off to attack the army troops at Jigüe, while Che stayed to defend Mompié and command the resistance at Minas del Frío. As Che arrived in Mompié on July 11, the Cuban air force launched a ferocious aerial bombardment of the place, this time dropping napalm as well as bombs. Then came unsettling news. Fidel’s brother Raúl, leading rebel forces in the Sierra Cristal, had just taken forty-nine Americans hostage. Che noted that Raúl had “written a manifesto made out to the entire world and signed by him. It was too strong and together with the arrest of the 49 Americans it seemed a note of dangerous ‘extremism.’”
In the four months since his move to the Sierra Cristal, Raúl had rapidly built up his fighting strength and made his presence felt throughout eastern Oriente. By July, he had more than 200 men under arms and had built up a guerrilla infrastructure complete with an armory, hospitals, schools, a road-building unit, an intelligence service, and a revolutionary judicial system. But all of that was now under threat. Although he was not facing the same kind of full-scale ground assault as his brother in the Sierra Maestra, Raúl’s forces were being pounded by Batista’s planes. In late June, with his forces dangerously low on ammunition, he decided to take drastic action by ordering the seizure of all Americans found within his territory.
On June 26, Raúl’s fighters attacked the American-owned Moa Bay Mining Company and made off with twelve American and Canadian employees. Another dozen North Americans were grabbed at the Nicaro nickel mine and the United Fruit Company’s sugar mill at Guaro. Twenty-four American sailors and marines were then abducted from a bus on the outskirts of the Guantánamo naval base. In a statement sent to the press, Raúl claimed he had taken the action to protest the delivery of rockets and napalm to Batista by the United States, and the secret refueling and loading of bombs onto Cuban warplanes at Guantánamo. The action sparked outrage in Washington, with several senators demanding American military intervention. Park Wollam, the American consul in Santiago, journeyed to meet with Raúl, and negotiations began.
Upon learning of the crisis, Fidel had gone on Radio Rebelde and ordered Raúl to release the hostages. He carefully balanced his public statements by declaring that hostage-taking was not the Movement’s policy, but that such actions were comprehensible in light of the delivery of rockets to Batista. Then he sent Raúl a private note in which he appeared to be warning his brother not to take any drastic steps with the hostages that might endanger the rebels’ image in the United States.
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Raúl’s dramatic show of force brought him some immediate dividends, however. The air attacks against his forces in the Sierra Cristal suddenly ceased, proving the extent of American influence over Batista after all. Raúl didn’t release all the hostages immediately, but drew the process out and used the lull to resupply his forces. It was July 18 before he freed the last hostages, after which the attacks resumed, but by then his Second Front was resupplied, able to defend itself, and ready for action. The hostage crisis had highlighted a facet of Raúl’s character that was worrying to some of his comrades. Without strict controls, Raúl was something of a loose cannon, and other widely publicized excesses would earn him a reputation as a violent man who would stop at nothing.
Che was losing comrades on a daily basis. Geonel Rodríguez, who had helped him found
El Cubano Libre
back in the days when El Hombrito was the first “free territory” of the Sierra Maestra, was mortally wounded in a mortar blast. “He was one of our most loved collaborators, a true revolutionary,” Che wrote in his journal. That night, word came of the death of Carlitos Más, whom Che described as an “old-young fighter who died from the burns and breaks he suffered together with Geonel.” Perhaps most frustrating of all, the deaths could not be translated into advances on the battlefield, at least not in Che’s sector. He continued to hold the line at Minas del Frío, but a stalemate had settled in, with the enemy soldiers digging trenches instead of advancing or falling back. The aerial bombardments continued. On July 17, the hospital at Mompié was hit, and Che oversaw the evacuation of its patients. The next day, he wrote, “Nothing new in the zone. The only pastime of the guards is killing the pigs we left around.”
As Che tried to rally his perimeter defenses around Minas del Frío, Fidel was beginning to wear down the enemy in his siege at Jigüe. In two days in early July, he took nineteen prisoners and captured eighteen weapons, including bazooka grenades, and he thought the enemy force, now without food supplies, would surrender within forty-eight hours. Discovering that the enemy commander, Major José Quevedo, was an old law school classmate of his, he wrote him a curious note on July 10: “I have often remembered that group of young officers who attracted my attention and awakened my sympathies because of their great longing for culture and the efforts they made to pursue their studies. ... What a surprise to know that you are around here! And however difficult the circumstances, I am always happy to hear from one of you, and I write these lines on the spur of the moment, without telling you or asking you for anything, only to greet you and to wish you, very sincerely, good luck.”
If Fidel had hoped to weaken Quevedo’s resolve, it didn’t work. He then used loudspeakers to barrage the besieged troops with propaganda
broadcasts, hoping to wear down their morale. On July 15 he wrote again to Quevedo, this time directly appealing to him to surrender: “It will not be a surrender to an enemy of the fatherland but to a sincere revolutionary, to a fighter who struggles for the good of all Cubans.”
Still Quevedo held out. But after one of Fidel’s men masqueraded as an army communications technician and sent word to the air force that the rebels had taken the camp, planes attacked Quevedo’s force, spreading panic among his troops. By July 18, Fidel had forty-two prisoners, a booty of sixty-six weapons, and 18,000 rounds of ammunition. “The encircled troops are on the verge of collapse,” he told Che.
The fall of Jigüe finally came on the evening of July 20. Quevedo walked out of the camp to surrender, with 146 soldiers following behind him. This was a watershed victory for the rebels. The army’s offensive had been effectively routed, and now it would be their turn to press their advantage.
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That same day, the “Caracas Pact” was announced over Radio Rebelde. Previously signed by Fidel on behalf of the July 26 Movement, it brought together eight opposition groups, including Carlos Prío’s
auténticos
, the Directorio Revolucionario, the so-called “Barquínista” military faction, and Justo Carrillo’s Montecristi movement. They were committed to a common strategy of overthrowing Batista through armed insurrection and the formation of a brief provisional government. Most important, the “Unity Manifesto of the Sierra Maestra” acknowledged Fidel Castro’s authority as “commander in chief of revolutionary forces.” As in all the previous pacts, the most notable Cuban opposition group not invited to sign was the PSP; and Che, who evidently thought it would be, remarked in his journal, “The unity seems to be going well on the outside but in the announcement the Partido Socialista is not included, which seems strange to me.” (It would appear that on the issue of links between the PSP and July 26, Fidel was momentarily keeping his counsel. To avoid provoking controversy, their ongoing high-level talks remained a secret.)
A two-day truce was finally arranged through the Red Cross, and on July 23 and 24 a total of 253 famished, exhausted army prisoners, including fifty-seven wounded, were handed over. They left behind a total of 161 weapons in rebel hands, including two mortars, a bazooka, and two heavy machine guns. Two hours before the cease-fire ended, Che mobilized his men; some of them were to hold the pass at La Maestra, while all the others would lay siege to the troops in Las Vegas. Within a day, they had the camp
encircled, and, following Fidel’s example in Jigüe, Che urged the soldiers there to surrender. On the morning of July 28, he met with two army officers who offered a deal. If Che let the army troops withdraw, they would leave all their food behind but take their arms with them. Che told them this was impossible, and returned to his own lines. Soon a sentinel warned him that the army was beating a retreat, driving away in trucks flying a white flag and a Red Cross flag. The meeting had been a diversionary tactic. Che ordered his men to open fire while he led units in pursuit.
“A desolate spectacle could be seen,” he wrote. “Backpacks and helmets thrown around along the road, bags with bullets and all kinds of belongings, even a jeep and a tank that was still intact ... Later the first prisoners started falling, among them the company doctor.” As Che’s units pressed the advance, however, they increasingly came under “friendly fire” from rebels hidden in the surrounding hills; one of Che’s prisoners was killed and a rebel officer badly wounded. “I had the uncomfortable situation of being besieged by our forces, who opened fire every time they saw a helmet. I sent a soldier to stop the fire with his hands up and in one place it gave results but in the other they continued firing for a while, wounding two more soldiers.”
When the situation was finally normalized and the scores of captured
guardias
were being led back to Las Vegas, an urgent message from Fidel reached Che as he was inspecting the captured tank. The army had also retreated from the sector of Santo Domingo that day, but it had been a ruse. As the rebels chased after the fleeing troops, Sánchez Mosquera took the Arroyones hilltop near Las Mercedes and outflanked them. One of the two rebel captains commanding the fighters there had been killed, while the other—Che’s former llano rival René Ramos Latour (Daniel)—had survived and was fighting back, but the battle was fierce. By the afternoon of the following day, Daniel was dead from a mortar wound in the stomach. “Profound ideological discrepancies separated me from René Ramos,” Che wrote in his journal that evening, “and we were politicial enemies, but he knew how to die fulfilling his duty, on the front line. Whoever dies like that does so because he feels an interior impulse [the existence of ] which I had denied him and which I rectify at this time.”
The army tank Che had captured at Las Mercedes now became an almost comic focus of the fighting. It was a grand prize in this essentially small-scale war, and Fidel wanted to preserve it at all costs. The enemy just as desperately sought its destruction. While the rebels tried to extract it from where it sat, stuck fast in the mud, planes tried to hit it with bombs. But the exertions of both sides proved fruitless. On August 5, Fidel commissioned a peasant with a team of oxen to drag it free, and in the process its steering
wheel was broken. There was little hope of repairing it. “Hopes dashed,” Fidel wrote Che that night. “It has been a long time since I’ve had such great pipe dreams.”
Two days later, shielded by a withering cover fire, the army began to move out en masse from its last besieged position in the Sierra Maestra. Batista’s vaunted offensive was over—but not the dying. On August 9, Beto Pesant, a veteran of the first group of volunteers from Manzanillo, was killed when an antiaircraft shell he was handling exploded. Che’s lover, Zoila Rodríguez, was at the scene. “Comandante Guevara, other rebels, and myself were carrying out a mission when Beto Pesant died,” she recalled. “When I heard an explosion, I saw that Guevara’s mule, called Armando, was injured and had thrown him [Che] into the air, I ran to his side but he was already getting up. I looked over at Pesant and saw that he was missing an arm, his head was destroyed and his chest was open. ... I began to scream: ‘Beto, don’t die, don’t die.’ They attended to him quickly. The
comandante
told me: ‘Zoila, he’s dead.’” Che ordered the dead man’s wife in Manzanillo to be contacted, and when she arrived, Zoila recalled: “She began to weep at his tomb, and we all cried and when I looked at Guevara he had tears in his eyes.”
In the wake of the army’s withdrawal, Fidel held another 160 soldiers, including some who were wounded, and he was eager to be rid of them. After much back-and-forth negotiating, a meeting was arranged on the morning of August 11 among him, Che, the army commanders, and Red Cross representatives. They talked amiably while having coffee. Over the next two days, a truce held in the Sierra Maestra as the wounded men and their able-bodied comrades were released. At one point, Che and Fidel even went on a short helicopter ride with their enemy counterparts. The truce also allowed the rebels to pause for judicial proceedings. Che recorded, “An army deserter who had tried to rape a girl was executed.”
In the lull, a high-level army emissary whom the rebels believed to be Batista’s personal representative urged Fidel to enter into negotiations with the regime. “He indirectly proposed his [Batista’s] replacement with a magistrate of the Supreme [Court] (the oldest one) and a peaceful solution,” Che observed. “[But] nothing concrete was reached.” Fidel saw no reason to rush into negotiations. He was planning to extend the war across the island and still had hopes of wooing General Cantillo, whose offensive he had just defeated. Che concluded later, “Batista’s army came out of that last offensive in the Sierra Maestra with its spine broken, but it had not yet been defeated. The struggle would go on.” Indeed, on August 14, after a rare act of civility in which the army airlifted some blood plasma to the rebels, the bombing and strafing attacks resumed.
Meanwhile, unnoticed by either the enemy or Fidel’s putative allies in the Caracas Pact, an important visitor to the Sierra Maestra took his leave from rebel territory. An official of the Communist Party Central Committee, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, had held secret talks with Fidel, after first visiting Raúl’s Second Front in the Sierra Cristal. Che recorded Rodríguez’s visit circumspectly, mentioning it in his journal only upon the PSP official’s departure: “Carlos Rafael left for the free zone. His impression is positive despite all the internal and external intrigues.”
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