Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
Although he was careful to conceal it, Che was paying a personal price for the austere revolutionary image he had constructed for himself. His
relationship with Zoila, his attachment to his mules, his habit of keeping pets, all could be taken as signs that he craved tenderness and solace to ease the harsh life he had adopted. When he arrived in the Escambray, he was expecting his personal messenger, Lidia, to join him. She was to be his courier to Fidel and Havana, and she had promised to bring him a puppy to replace Hombrito, a little dog named after the valley he’d fought over, which he’d had to leave behind in the Sierra Maestra. But Lidia never made it. She and her companion, twenty-one-year-old Clodomira Acosta Ferrals, were betrayed, captured, and then “disappeared” by Batista’s agents. Che felt her loss deeply. As he wrote a few months after her murder, “[For] me personally—Lidia occupies a special place. That is why I offer today these reminiscences in homage to her—a modest flower laid on the mass grave that this once happy island became.”
During the trek across Camagüey, Che lost the military cap that had belonged to his friend Ciro Redondo. He had worn it ever since Ciro’s death. Oscarito Fernández Mell had rarely seen Che as upset as he was that day. “That cap was a disaster,” Oscarito recalled. “The visor was broken, it was dirty and shitty, but because it had belonged to Ciro, it was what he wanted to wear. Che was a man who was both hard and extraordinarily sentimental.” The cap was replaced by the black beret that would soon become Che’s trademark.
The
barbudos
—as Fidel’s bearded, long-haired rebels were now known—were seen by a growing segment of the public as holding the keys to Cuba’s political future. Fidel thus expected popular support for an island-wide offensive, which was to be launched by sabotaging the elections scheduled for November 3. He decreed a traffic ban, a consumer boycott of the lottery, and a halt to purchases of newspapers and attendance at parties or festivities of any kind. Citizens should buy only the bare essentials so as to deny the regime revenue. In case anyone harbored doubts about his opposition to the elections, Fidel threatened all candidates with prison or death.
The limited field of candidates was a study in out-of-touch politics. Running against Prime Minister Andrés Rivero Agüero, who had been
chosen by Batista as his successor, were the Ortodoxo splinter politician Carlos Márquez Sterling and Ramón Grau San Martín, the discredited former president who now headed a faction of the Auténtico Party. Not surprisingly, there was little enthusiasm among the citizens, and voter turn-out was expected to be minimal.
To enforce his decrees, Fidel sent out new columns to operate on the llano of Oriente and Camagüey, and he gave Juan Almeida orders to begin encircling the city of Santiago. He also took the urban action groups off their tether, and in September they carried out some spectacular assaults in Havana, destroying the transmitting facilities of two government radio stations and setting fire to Rancho Boyeros, the country’s main airport.
Political repression by the regime continued unabated. Several gruesome police murders of civilians, including those of two young sisters in Havana, outraged and sickened the public. The routine torture of people detained by the Buró de Represión a las Actividades Comunistas (BRAC), which was funded by the CIA, had become so notorious that the CIA’s own inspector general complained. In September, one of Che’s columns in Camagüey fell into an ambush. Eighteen rebels were killed, and the eleven captured survivors, including wounded men, were summarily executed.
The revolution in Cuba was also drawing in players far from its shore. With the U.S. State Department still blocking new arms shipments to the Cuban regime, Batista had begun turning to alternative arms suppliers. Fidel’s intermediaries appealed to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to halt the sale of fifteen British Sea Fury warplanes to Cuba, but the intermediaries were snubbed. Fidel responded by decreeing the confiscation of all British-owned property in Cuba and called for a boycott of British goods.
In a dress rehearsal for their future showdown, Fidel and Washington had begun a war of words. The White House rebuffed the rebels’ appeal to withdraw the U.S. military mission from Cuba, and a more hostile State Department hinted it might take action after rebels briefly seized two employees of American Texaco in an ambush. In late October, Batista withdrew his soldiers guarding the American nickel mine of Nicaro. When Raúl’s forces moved in to occupy the mine, the U.S. Navy sent a transport ship, backed up by an aircraft carrier, to evacuate the fifty-five American civilians there. The State Department issued a veiled threat of retaliatory action if American hostages were taken again. Fidel warned that if the State Department made the error of “leading its country into an act of aggression against our sovereignty, be certain that we will know how to defend it honorably.”
There were increasing reports of discontent brewing within the armed forces, and Fidel used every opportunity to urge military men to reconsider their service at the hands of “the tyranny” rather than to “the fatherland,”
which
he
represented. Officers or soldiers who defected to the rebels’ “Free Territory” were welcome as long as they brought their weapons with them; their current salaries would continue to be paid, and they were promised free room and board through the end of the war. Fidel wrote again to General Cantillo, urging him to lead a revolt against Batista, but Cantillo remained noncommittal. At the same time, one of Fidel’s agents was trying to persuade some dissident officers to defect and form a Rebel Army column of their own.
As Fidel plotted and schemed, a stream of visitors and emissaries came and went from the Sierra Maestra. Some, such as the PSP official Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, stayed on as permanent guests. Thanks to a new cook brought up especially from a restaurant on the llano, Fidel was eating well again and had even gained weight. He had his own jeep and permanent electric power from a generator. He had time to read books and listen to music. He could speak by telephone to the outside world when he wanted to. Celia Sánchez was sharing his double bed. Life was good.
Fidel was confident, but not complacent, about the future. In Oriente, the Rebel Army now numbered more than 800 men. Arms and ammunition were no longer in short supply, thanks to the matériel captured in the summer offensive and to continuing arms-supply flights from abroad. He was also successfully filling his war chest. He had imposed a fifteen-cent tax on each 250-pound bag of sugar harvested, and the sugar mills of Oriente, including those owned by the United States, were paying up. He even had his own modest rebel air force under the command of Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz.
Fidel announced his long-planned agrarian reform bill, called “Law One of the Sierra Maestra.” It promised to distribute state land and any land owned by Batista to landless peasants, guaranteed the continued ownership of land not exceeding 150 acres, and promised that if land was confiscated from those with large “idle” landholdings, they would be compensated. Most significantly, at least in terms of the future, Fidel was edging ever closer to an overt alliance with the Communist Party. By late October, the formation of a new labor organization, the Frente Obrera Nacional de Unidad, which included the PSP, was announced.
Fidel was operating on several levels. While he pacified his anticommunist allies with a middle-of-the-road agrarian reform bill, he was shoring up a working alliance with the Communists that went far beyond the labor unity deal. The practical groundwork was already being carried out by Che, Raúl, and Camilo. In Raúl’s Second Front, a political-military alliance between the PSP and July 26 was up and running. The Peasant Congress that Pepe Ramírez had organized was held in September, presided over by Raúl. Immediately after arriving in Las Villas, Camilo set in motion plans
for a National Conference of Sugar Workers. This was one of the first steps in the gradual merger of the July 26 Movement and the PSP that eventually culminated in the creation of a new Cuban Communist Party, headed by Fidel.
Che marched through Oriente and Camagüey with agrarian reform in mind, but he had been too busy trying to survive to do very much about it. A week after setting out, in the rice-growing region of eastern Camagüey, he had urged workers at a large private farm to form a union and had gotten an enthusiastic reaction. “One person with a social consciousness could work wonders in this area,” he told Fidel later. “There is plenty of vegetation to hide in.” Three weeks later, in western Camagüey, finding himself on a large rice farm owned by an associate of Batista, Che stopped to talk with its American manager. He noted in his journal, “I spoke to the administrator to explain the essence of our economic concepts and our assurances for the protection of the rice industry so that he could transmit it to his boss.”
Joel Iglesias recalled the encounter in more detail. “When we left there, [Che] asked me: ‘What did you think of him?’ I replied that I didn’t like those guys. He told me: ‘Me neither, [and] in the end we’ll have to fight against them,’ and added: ‘I would die with a smile on my lips, on the crest of a hill, behind a rock, fighting against these people.’”
But before he fought the Yankees, Che had to deal with problems closer to home. He entered the Escambray proper on October 16 and was engulfed in the intrigues there. Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, the leader of the Second National Front of the Escambray, had briefly seized the July 26 commander operating in Las Villas, Víctor Bordón Machado. He was also at odds with the official Directorio Revolucionario armed group, led by Faure Chomón. A delegation representing the Las Villas July 26 complained about Bordón, who they said had become “aggressive” and was acting on his own. Hoping to settle things, Che called for a council to be held at the Directorio’s base camp. Meanwhile, he tried to convince the July 26 men of the need for a local unity agreement, and proposed a strategy for joint urban uprisings and guerrilla attacks in Las Villas’s cities during the elections. “I didn’t find much enthusiasm for the idea,” he noted.
Che had just established a provisional camp at a place called Los Gavilanes when he was approached by an officer of Gutiérrez Menoyo’s Second Front. Despite the front’s anticommunist ethos and its reputation for banditry, Che was anxious to see if some form of anti-Batista coalition could be forged. In mid-October, he and his men set out for the camp of one of the most notorious Second Front warlords, Comandante Jesús Carreras. When they got there, after a two-day hike, they found Carreras gone, but he had left behind a threatening notice. As Che recounted in
his diary, the notice warned that “no troops could pass through this territory, that they would be warned the first time but the second, expelled or exterminated.”
When Carreras returned, Che saw that “he had already drunk half a bottle of liquor, which was approximately half his daily quota.” When Che announced he could not permit Carreras’s use of the word “warning,” Carreras quickly backed down, explaining that the threat had been intended only for marauding fighters from the Directorio faction. Che left believing he had handled things diplomatically, but he also knew that Carreras was “an enemy.”
*
At the Directorio headquarters at Los Arroyos, Che met with Faure Chomón and Rolando Cubela. They were open to the idea of cooperation with the July 26 Movement but rejected any talks with the Second Front or the Communists, and stressed their unwillingness to cede their independent status in a unity pact with Che. As an alternative, Che proposed that they work out “measures to partition territory and zones of influence where the forces of other organizations could operate freely.” Setting aside the fine points, he suggested launching a joint attack against Güinía de Miranda, a town with an army garrison at the base of the Escambray, after which the Directorio force and his would split any weapons captured. “They accepted in principle but without enthusiasm,” he noted in his diary.
Enrique “Sierra” Oltuski, the Las Villas coordinator of the July 26 Movement, arrived in Che’s camp one pitch-black night. Men were milling around a bonfire, and Oltuski approached them, trying to make out faces. “I had in my mind the image of Che that I had seen published in the newspapers,” he recalled. “None of these faces was that face. But there was a man, of regular build, who was wearing a beret over very long hair. The beard was not very thick. He was dressed in a black cape with his shirt open. The flames of the bonfire and the mustache, which fell over either side of the mouth, gave him a Chinese aspect. I thought of Genghis Khan.”
Their first meeting did not go well. The Havana-born son of Polish emigrants, Oltuski was trained as an engineer but had put aside his career for the revolution. He had helped to organize the Civic Resistance, and was a member of the July 26 National Directorate. He was also an anticommunist. He and Che immediately locked horns, their first clash coming over Che’s proposal to carry out bank robberies in Las Villas to acquire funds.
Oltuski and his llano comrades were vehemently opposed. Che wrote contemptuously in his diary, “When I told him to give us a report of all the banks in the towns, to attack them and take their money, they threw themselves on the ground in anguish. [And] with their silence they opposed the free distribution of land and demonstrated their subordination to the great capital interests, most of all Sierra [Oltuski].”
Oltuski reconstructed his own version of their argument over land reform in a memoir:
Guevara:
When we have broadened and consolidated our territory we will implement an agrarian reform. We will divide the land among those who work it. What do you think of the agrarian reform?
Oltuski:
It is indispensable. [
Che’s eyes lit up
] Without agrarian reform economic progress is not possible.
Guevara:
Or social progress.
Oltuski:
Yes social progress, of course. I have written an agrarian thesis for the Movement.
Guevara:
Really? What did it say?