Che Guevara (57 page)

Rodríguez’s visit is still clouded by secrecy, but he evidently received Fidel’s go-ahead to pursue a merger between the PSP and the July 26 Movement in a reconstituted labor front. Another signal of cooperation was Fidel’s authorization for the Party to send a permanent representative to the sierra. Only three weeks after Rodríguez left, Luis Más Martín, a veteran PSP official and an old friend of Castro’s, arrived, and in September Rodríguez himself returned, staying with Fidel until the end of the war.

Raúl Castro and the PSP had forged much more than an “understanding” in the Sierra Cristal. Around the time Raúl left the Sierra Maestra to open his new front, José “Pepe” Ramírez, chief of the National Association of Small Farmers, which was controlled by the PSP, was ordered by the Party to make his way to the Sierra Cristal and “report to Raúl.” When Ramírez arrived, Raúl gave him the job of organizing the peasants living within his territory and preparing a Peasant Congress to be held in the autumn. That work was now well under way, as was the formation of a Communist-run troop instructors’ school, complete with Marxist political orientation.

Curiously, Raúl also enjoyed the support of a considerable number of militant Catholics from the city of Santiago. But it was the Communist influence that was the salient characteristic of Raúl’s Second Front. Indeed, it was the spawning ground for many of Cuba’s future Communist Party officials. Although he had not been formally a Party member since his ouster from the Socialist Youth after his role in Fidel’s “putschist” adventure at Moncada, Raúl had remained faithful and, with a wink and a nod from Fidel, proceeded to cement his ties.

These developments could not have been very comforting to the Americans, but for now there was little they could do to assuage their growing fears about the true goals of the increasingly powerful Cuban Rebel Army. Right now, those goals called for an ambitious expansion of the war. Che and Camilo Cienfuegos were to leave the Sierra Maestra and take the war to central and western Cuba. Che’s Ciro Redondo column was to assume revolutionary authority in the Escambray mountains of central Las Villas province, “strike relentlessly at the enemy,” and cut the island in half. Meanwhile, Camilo was to replicate the feat of his column’s illustrious nineteenth-century namesake, Antonio Maceo, a hero of the Cuban war of independence, by marching all the way to the westernmost province of Pinar del Río.

Che was anxious to get going, but on August 15 he complained, “I haven’t been able to organize the column yet because of a cumulus of contradictory orders as to its composition.” It was a matter of finding the men to go with him, and so far only a tiny trickle of volunteers had filtered in from different squads. Che himself didn’t help matters by telling the fighters that probably only half of those who came with him would survive the mission, and that they should be prepared to do battle continuously and go hungry most of the time. Che’s mission was not for everybody. Fidel summoned him to Mompié. He had organized one squad for him, led by El Vaquerito, and told Che to recruit any other men he needed from the platoons on hand. Che’s political commissar at Minas del Frío, Pablo Ribalta, began selecting men from the school.

Over the next fortnight, under incessant aerial bombardments, Che painstakingly pieced together his expeditionary force: a column of 148 men, with half a dozen jeeps and pickup trucks. Camilo’s smaller force of eighty-two men was also assembled and ready to go. Then, on the night of August 29—as he prepared for a dawn departure by loading some jeeps with ammunition just flown in from Miami—the army captured two of his pickups loaded with supplies, and all his gasoline for the journey. His remaining vehicles now useless, he resolved to set out on foot.

On August 31, as Che finally prepared to leave, Zoila asked to accompany him. He said no. They bade each other farewell in the village of El Jíbaro. It was the last time they would be together as lovers. “He left me in charge of his mule Armando,” Zoila recalled. “I cared for him as if he were a real Christian.”

Che and Camilo Cienfuegos, his swashbuckling friend and a hero of the revolution.

For six weeks, from early September into October 1958, in the unceasing downpours of the Cuban rainy season, Che and Camilo’s troops waded through the rice fields and swamps of the llano, forded swollen rivers, dodged the army, and came under frequent aerial attacks. The exhausting marches through stinking swamps and along devilish trails, Che wrote, became “truly horrible.” They had been detected by the enemy early on, and after firefights on September 9 and 14, the army had tracked their movements closely.

“Hunger, thirst, weariness, the feeling of impotence against the enemy forces that were increasingly closing in on us, and above all, the terrible foot disease that the peasants call
mazamorra
—which turned each step our soldiers took into an intolerable torment—had made us an army of shadows,” Che wrote. “It was difficult to advance, very difficult. The troops’ physicial condition worsened day by day, and meals—today yes, tomorrow no, the next day maybe—in no way helped to alleviate the level of misery we were suffering.”

Several men were killed in firefights, others deserted, and Che allowed a few more demoralized or frightened men to leave. As always,
chivatos
were a problem. Che reported to Fidel that “the social consciousness of the Camagüeyan peasantry is minimal, and we had to face the consequences of numerous informers.” In the meantime, propaganda reports about Che’s Communism had intensified. On September 20, Batista’s chief of staff, General Francisco Tabernilla, reported that army troops had destroyed a 100-man column led by Che Guevara, and had captured evidence that his rebels were “being trained through Communist methods.”

“What happened,” Che explained to Fidel later, “was that in one of the knapsacks [left behind after a firefight] they found a notebook that listed
the name, address, weapon, and ammunition of the entire column, member by member. In addition, one member of this column, who is also a member of the PSP [Pablo Ribalta] left his knapsack containing documents from that organization.” The army exploited the “Communist evidence” to instill fear and hatred of the rebels. In a cable dated September 21 that was sent to the army units stationed along Che’s route to the Escambray, Lieutenant Colonel Suárez Suquet exhorted his officers to use all available resources and “muster courage” to stop the “guerrilla enemy” that was “murdering men no matter what their beliefs are.” Suárez pointed out that “the recent capture of Communist documentation from the foreigner known as ‘Che Guevara’ and his henchmen, who have always lived beyond the law ..., [shows they are] all paid by the Kremlin. ... Onward Cuban Soldier: we will not permit these rats who have penetrated surreptitiously in this province to leave again.”

As Che approached the Escambray, he knew he was heading into a hornets’ nest of rivalries and intrigues. Various armed groups were operating in the area, virtually all of them were competing for influence and territorial control, and some were little more than rustling marauders, or
comevacas
(cow-eaters). Che wrote in his diary, “From here I get the impression there are a lot of dirty rags to wash on all sides.” Fidel had ordered him to unify the various factions and bring them under his control, but he wasn’t counting on much help from the July 26 Movement. His experience on the llano so far had shown him that his natural ally was the PSP.

Che’s arrival provided the PSP with a golden opportunity to acquire a central role in the armed struggle, something the other factions in the area had consistently denied it. In rural Yaguajay, in northern Las Villas, the PSP now had its own rebel front, the Máximo Gómez, with sixty-five armed men led by Félix Torres, who had been refused cooperation by both the local chapter of the July 26 Movement and Eloy Gutíerrez Menoyo’s “Second National Front of the Escambray,” a Directorio splinter group. The Party sent emissaries to greet Che in early October, as he approached the Escambray. They offered him guides and money, and promised a radio transmitter and mimeograph machine for his propaganda efforts. Che accepted, gratefully, and asked for a direct connection with the PSP leadership in Las Villas.

After another miserable week of slogging through mud and swamps and being harassed by warplanes, Che and his men reached a farm in the foothills of the Escambray. They had crossed more than half the length of Cuba, a distance of more than 350 miles, mostly on foot, and they were hungry, sick, and exhausted. Twenty-six-year-old Ovidio Díaz Rodríguez, the secretary of the Communist Party’s Juventud Socialista for Las Villas province,
met them on horseback. The government’s incessant propaganda about the “Argentine Communist” had fueled his awe of Che, and, as he neared their rendezvous, he was overwhelmed with emotion. “I wanted to hug him when I met him,” he recalled, but he shyly shook Che’s hand. “I saw he was very thin and I imagined all the suffering he had surely gone through since leaving the Sierra Maestra. I was struck by his personality and the respect everyone showed him. My admiration grew.”

Che, with characteristic bluntness, chastised Díaz for being incautious in approaching his camp head-on. “You should have followed my tracks,” he said, before inviting Díaz to sit down and talk. “He asked me to summarize everything I knew about the situation in the Escambray,” Díaz said—“the armed groups, the situation of the Party in the province and in the mountains, the support it had, whether the socialist bases were strong. He spoke to me with respect and in an affable way.” Che noted in his diary on October 15 that he had met with “a representative of the PSP,” who told him that the Party was “at his disposition” if he could forge a unity deal with the various armed groups. It was a good start.

Camilo had also made contact with the PSP. His column had veered north, to Yaguajay, where Félix Torres’s column was located, and on October 8 the two men had met in the field. Torres happily placed himself and his men under Camilo’s command. The two groups maintained separate camps but coordinated their actions. Fidel was so pleased with the arrangement that he ordered Camilo to stay on in Las Villas and act as a bolster to Che’s operations instead of pushing on to Pinar del Río.

Over the next couple of days, as Che and his men moved into the Escambray proper, Díaz visited him. Each time, he came away more impressed with Che’s leadership abilities. “He knew his men well,” Díaz said—“who had come from the different revolutionary organizations, who had risen up as workers or peasants, who were anticommunists due to a lack of culture. He measured his men for their fighting spirit but he knew how to distinguish perfectly between those of left or right.”

It was a heterogeneous group. In addition to the relatively inexperienced graduates of Minas del Frío, Che had brought along his protégés. Besides the Communists, Ribalta and Acosta, there was Ramiro Valdés, his trusted deputy, who now sported a sinister-looking goatee that Che liked to say made him resemble Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB. The young doctor Oscarito Fernández Mell, whose company Che enjoyed, and whom he liked to tease as a “petite bourgeoisie,” was with them, as were the loyal youngsters Joel Iglesias, Guile Pardo, El Vaquerito—who led his own daredevil “Suicide Squad”—and the Acevedo brothers. And there were exotic characters such as “El Negro” Lázaro, a huge, brave black man with
an equally grand sense of humor who dragged a saddle with him throughout the invasion, saying he wanted it for the day when he found a horse to ride—a day, of course, that never came. Finally, there was a group of young men whose destinies were to become permanently linked to Che’s, many of whom stayed with him after the war as his personal bodyguards. Most of them had few political notions but were eager for adventure, and Che was their key to glorious future lives, in which they too would become modern-day “liberation heroes.”
*

What was it about Che that so magnetized these men? He could not have been more different from most of them. He was a foreigner, an intellectual, a professional. He read books they did not understand. As their leader, he was demanding, strict, and notoriously severe in his punishments—especially with those he had selected to become “true revolutionaries.” When young Harry Villegas and a few other youths went on a hunger strike at Minas del Frío over the bad quality of the food, Che threatened to shoot them. In the end, after conferring with Fidel, he softened, making them go without food for five days, “so they could know what real hunger was.” There were many more times when they suffered Che’s severity for mistakes that other commanders might have passed over or even committed themselves.

Each sanction Che meted out came with an explanation, a sermon about the importance of self-sacrifice, personal example, and social conscience. He wanted the men to know why they were being punished, and how they could redeem themselves. Naturally, Che’s unit was not for everyone. Many fell by the wayside, unable to take the hardship and his rigorous demands, but for those who stuck it out, being “with Che” became a source of pride. He earned their respect and devotion because he lived as they did, refusing extra luxuries due to his rank, taking the same risks as they did in battle. He was a role model for these youths, about half of whom were black, many of them from poor farming families.
†