Che Guevara (43 page)

Raúl Castro and Che, the two radicals in the Rebel Army.

The first trek of the revamped Rebel Army looked like an episode in a Keystone Cops movie. Climbing up the first large hill, one of their most exotic new volunteers—one of three teenage American runaways from the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay—fainted from exhaustion. On the descent, two men from the advance squad became lost, promptly followed by the entire second platoon. Then Sotús’s platoon and the rear guard unit got lost as well. “Fidel threw a terrible tantrum,” Che wrote. “But in the end, we all reached the agreed-upon house.”

After a day spent resting and devouring yucca and plaintains raided from a farmer’s field, they made what Che called “another pathetic ascent” up Los Altos de Espinosa, the hill where they had been ambushed. They held a brief ceremony in honor of Jorge Zenon Acosta at the spot where he was buried. Che found the blanket he had lost caught in a bramble nearby, a reminder of his “speedy strategic retreat,” and he vowed to himself that he would never again lose equipment in that manner. A new man—“a mulatto named Paulino”—was named to the general staff to help carry Che’s heavy load of medicine, for the strain of carrying it had already begun to aggravate his asthma.

This was to be the pattern of the rebels’ existence for the next few weeks. Fidel had intended to use their break from combat to build up reserves of food, arms, and ammunition, and to expand his peasant support network, but first they had to find enough food just to get them from one day to the next. As they moved around the sierra, he made deals with peasants to reserve a portion of their future harvests for him, but things remained extremely tight—and since there were now over eighty men, they could no longer arrive en masse at a peasant’s home and expect to be fed. Meat had become a rarity. Their diet often consisted of plantains, yucca, and
malanga
, the starchy, purple-colored tuber that is a staple of Cuba’s peasants. For Fidel, who enjoyed a good meal, this period of
vacas flacas
, or “lean cows,” was particularly disagreeable and put him in a bad mood. On April 8, after Fidel had left camp on a short mission and missed the evening meal, Che saw his temper flare. “Fidel returned late, pissed off because we had eaten rice and because things hadn’t worked out the way he had hoped.”

The lack of food soon led them to carry out more desperate actions, including some that bordered on simple banditry. One night some men were sent to plunder a general store, while another group was dispatched to give a reputed
chivato
named Popa a scare and confiscate one of his cows. When the second squad returned, Che noted, “They struck a good blow and took a horse from Popa, but have come away with the impression that he isn’t a
chivato
after all. He wasn’t paid for the horse, but was promised he would be if he behaved himself.” The horse went into the cooking pot, but at first the
guajiros
,
outraged that a useful working animal had been killed for food, refused to eat it. Leftovers were then salted to be made into
tasajo
, a kind of jerky. Fidel delayed his plans to move camp while it was being prepared. As Che observed drily, “The consideration for the
tasajo
made Fidel change his mind.”

Outside the Sierra Maestra, the political climate had become volatile. In the face of increasing violence, there were demands for new elections. A few politicians called for talks with the rebels, which suggested that they were being taken more seriously, but then Batista declared that such talks were unnecessary because there were no rebels. Nevertheless, he promoted Major Barrera Pérez, the “pacifier” of Santiago’s November uprising, to colonel and gave him 1,500 soldiers to clean up the Sierra Maestra.

Fidel received a garbled message from Crescencio Pérez in which the
guajiro
leader admitted that he didn’t have the number of men he had previously claimed—nor were his men armed—but that he had gathered some volunteers together, and he asked if Fidel could come and pick them up. He couldn’t bring them himself, he said, because he had a “bad leg.” Che’s notes are cryptic: “Fidel answered that all offers that were serious were accepted, and that he should come later with the armed men.” Fidel was being cagey, avoiding a situation that might be a trap in case the
guajiro
was attempting a double cross.

By necessity, the rebels began making a stronger effort to establish their relationship with the sierra’s inhabitants. Che even began holding open-air medical
consultorias
. “It was monotonous,” he recalled. “I had few medicines to offer and the clinical cases in the sierra were all more or less the same: prematurely aged and toothless women, children with distended bellies, parasitism, rickets, general vitamin deficiency.” He blamed the condition of the peasants on overwork and a meager diet. “We began to feel in our flesh and blood the need for a definitive change in the life of the people,” he wrote. “The idea of agrarian reform became clear, and oneness with the people ceased being theory and was converted into a fundamental part of our being.” Perhaps without realizing it, Che had evolved into the revolutionary doctor he had once dreamed of becoming.

While the rebels adapted to life in the sierra, the Movement leaders in the llano were working hard to build them a lifeline in the “Resistencia Cívica” underground support network. Frank País had recruited Raúl Chibás, president of the Ortodoxo Party and brother of the late senator Eduardo Chibás, to head the Havana branch. The economist Felipe Pazos, the former president of the Cuban National Bank and father of Javier Pazos—who had helped arrange
the Herbert Matthews interview—joined as well. In Santiago, the network was headed by a well-known physician, Dr. Angel Santos Buch.

Coordination efforts had been dealt a blow with the recent captures of key members of the National Directorate. Faustino Pérez and the journalist Carlos Franqui, the underground propagandist of the July 26 Movement, had been arrested on suspicion of having links to the assault on the palace. They joined Armando Hart in Havana’s El Príncipe prison, while Frank País remained in custody in Santiago. Contact was maintained by means of smuggled letters. Virtually alone among the Movement leadership, Celia Sánchez remained at large. She had become Fidel’s principal contact with the outside world. He constantly sent her letters, alternately cajoling and irate, asking for more funds and supplies for his growing army.

By April 15 the rebels were back in Arroyo del Infierno, where Che had killed his first man. A squad sent out to find food and collect intelligence from the locals learned that there was a
chivato
nearby. His name was Filiberto Mora. Fidel fretted. The news of the
chivato
had coincided with an overflight by a government plane, and he was anxious to move camp again. As they prepared to head out, one of the new squad leaders, Guillermo García, showed up with the alleged squealer. García had impersonated an army officer to trick him into coming. “The man, Filiberto, had been deceived,” Che wrote in his journal, “but the minute he saw Fidel he realized what was happening and started to apologize.” Terrified, he confessed all his past crimes, including his role in guiding troops to the ambush at Arroyo del Infierno. Even more alarming, it emerged that one of Mora’s companions had gone off to inform the army of the rebels’ current location. “The
chivato
was executed,” Che wrote. “Ten minutes after giving him the shot in the head I declared him dead.”

As they decamped, a runner arrived with a letter from Celia and $500. She wrote that more money would be coming soon and, in response to Fidel’s request for more journalists, promised to find some and bring them into the sierra herself. A letter also came from Armando Hart, smuggled out of his jail cell. Che was displeased and suspicious with whatever Hart wrote. He remarked in his journal, “In it he shows himself to be positively anticommunist and he even insinuates a certain kind of deal with the Yankee embassy.”
*

By the end of April, more peasants had joined up, and the rebels’ supply system had begun to work more effectively. Men and mules now arrived daily with foodstuffs. Word came that two gringos, Robert Taber and Wendell Hoffman from the American CBS network, would be arriving to meet with Fidel, accompanied by Celia Sánchez and Haydée Santamaría. Herbert Matthews’s articles in
The New York Times
on Fidel and the rebellion in Cuba had sparked widespread interest in the American press. Taber was to file for CBS radio, and he and his cameraman also planned to make a television documentary about the rebels. Fidel moved his
estado mayor
above the main rebel camp onto the summit of a hill, both for increased protection and, as Che noted, “to impress the journalists.”

The journalists were suitably impressed and began working right away, spending their first day interviewing the three American runaways, who had become famous in the United States. For his own interview, Fidel had another spectacular media coup in mind. He wanted to climb Cuba’s highest mountain, Pico Turquino, and give a press conference at the summit. On April 28, almost everyone made the climb to the top—about 6,500 feet, according to Fidel’s handy altimeter. There, at Cuba’s highest point, Fidel gave his filmed interview to Taber and Hoffman, and everyone fired off weapons. Wheezing from asthma, Che was the last man up, but felt immensely pleased with himself for having made it.

After descending from Pico Turquino, Che observed with relief that his asthma had begun to clear, but, even so, Fidel assigned him to the rear guard to assist Victor Buehlman, one of the three American runaways, who complained that he had a stomachache and was unable to carry his backpack. Che helped him, grudgingly, and grumbled in his journal that he suspected the young American of suffering more from homesickness than anything else.

The ascent of Pico Turquino coincided with the influx of a type of volunteer the rebels had not seen before: youths romantically attracted to the cause. One boy who showed up said he had been trying to track them for two months. Che initially dismissed two other adolescents, from central Cuba’s Camagüey province, as “a couple of adventurers,” but the Rebel Army could not afford to be too choosy, and they were accepted. One of them, Roberto Rodríguez, eventually became one of the “most likable and best-loved figures of our revolutionary war, ‘Vaquerito’ [Little Cowboy],” Che noted later. Vaquerito’s exploits would earn him a hallowed place in Cuba’s pantheon of revolutionary heroes. “Vaquerito did not have a political idea in his head, nor did he seem to be anything other than a happy, healthy boy, who saw all of this as a marvelous adventure,” Che wrote. “He came barefoot and Celia lent him an extra pair of shoes, which were made
of leather and were the type worn in Mexico; this was the only pair that fit him, since his feet were so small. With the new shoes and a great palm leaf hat, Vaquerito looked like a Mexican cowboy, or vaquero, which is how he got his name.”

Another new volunteer was a
guajiro
named Julio Guerrero, one of the late Eutimio Guerra’s neighbors in the valley of El Mulato. The army had suspected him of having links to the rebels and his home had been burned down. Guerrero said that he had been offered a bounty to kill Fidel, but a much more modest one than the reputed $10,000 that Eutimio had been promised: a mere $300 and a pregnant cow.

Just as the rebels could not afford to turn away prospective fighters whose political mettle was unproved, neither could they be overly selective about their civilian allies. When a July 26 man brought news that weapons rescued from the Directorio’s failed assault on the palace had been smuggled to Santiago, Fidel sent him back to retrieve some with a local guide who, as Che noted in his journal, knew the sierra well “thanks to his profession of marijuana distributor.”

To Che’s surprise, El Gallego Morán reappeared. Still limping from his wounded leg, Morán was brimming over with excitement about a “super-secret plan” he wished to propose. Che was chagrined to learn that Fidel had agreed to send El Gallego to Mexico to bring back the July 26 Movement members who had been left there and to go to the United States to raise funds. “Everything I said to him about how dangerous it was to send a man like El Gallego, a confessed deserter, with low morals, a charlatan, an intriguer and liar to the maximum ... was useless,” Che wrote. “He argues that it is better to send El Gallego to do something, and not let him go to the U.S. feeling resentful.”

Word arrived that another American reporter was on his way to meet Fidel. Taber’s cameraman had already left, with the film smuggled out separately, but Taber was staying on to do a story for
Life
magazine. When he heard about the new reporter, Taber asked Fidel to stall him until he had finished, so he could be sure of having an exclusive. Fidel agreed and ordered the other reporter detained en route for several days.

Their
marijuanero
guide returned, bringing supplies, money, and the news that a rendezvous point for the arrival of the new weapons had been arranged in an area several days’ march northeast of Pico Turquino. As they prepared to move out, Che carried the message from Fidel to where most of the rebels were camped, but it was after dark and he became lost. He spent the next three days on his own, alternately hiding and wandering around in the bush until he found his way back to his comrades. When he finally reached the rearguard camp, where the new journalist, a Hungarian-American
freelancer named Andrew St. George, was still being detained, he was welcomed with spontaneous applause. “The reception from everyone was affectionate,” he wrote. But he was disturbed to learn that a “people’s trial” had been held in the camp. “They told me that they had liquidated a
chivato
named Napoles and freed two others who weren’t so guilty. The men are doing whatever they please.”