Che Guevara (61 page)

Aleida participated in the September 1957 uprising in Cienfuegos, and in armed actions during the April 1958 general strike in Las Villas. During
the security crackdown that followed the strike, the Las Villas directorate organized a guerrilla force to operate in the rural areas of the province. Aleida helped: sneaking fugitives into the countryside; smuggling food, weapons, and ammunition, and messages to them. After Che’s arrival, Aleida made repeated trips to and from the sierra, taking visitors and carrying correspondence and money to him. By November, an effective, if not acrimony-free partnership between the llano and sierra July 26 factions had been secured in the Escambray, and Aleida, as the principal courier, was becoming a familiar face at Che’s encampment. One day, Che told her he had decided to impose a war tax on sugar-mill owners, and asked her help in collecting it. It was after returning from such a mission in late November that she found out that her cover had been blown and that the police had raided her home. Returning to Santa Clara was now out of the question, but when she went to ask Che’s permission to remain in the guerrilla zone, he was not pleased; as a rule, women were not permitted to live in the guerrilla camps. Given Aleida’s situation, however, the
comandante
relented.

Like most of her llano comrades, Aleida had a poor opinion of the Cuban Communist Party. Her antipathy stemmed from her university days, when she had a Communist professor who was vociferously opposed to insurrectional activity. Now, however, the war was at a critical stage, and Che’s unifying efforts had helped to defuse the sectarian rivalries and galvanized Las Villas’s opposition groups into action. And if she initially distrusted
el comunista
Che, she put aside her feelings, for very soon she found herself falling in love with him. (Eventually, because of Che, Aleida would alter her negative opinion of “socialists,” but she would never lose her distrust of the “old Communists” of the PSP.)

By late November, the air force was pounding Che’s front in daily bombardments, and the army had begun moving several companies of heavily armed troops and tanks toward Pedrero in a three-pronged offensive. Camilo Cienfuegos came with some of his units to help out, and for six days the two sides battled. By December 4, the army’s offensive was shattered. The guerrillas had stopped the advance on all fronts, then chased the soldiers all the way to Fomento in the west and to the village of Santa Lucia in the east. They also captured a healthy supply of war matériel, including a tank equipped with a 37mm cannon. One of Che’s squads destroyed two strategic bridges, isolating the army garrisons in Cabaiguán, Sancti Spíritus, and Trinidad, and opening up a large new swath of territory to the rebel forces. Now, it was Che’s turn to go on the offensive.

Before Camilo Cienfuegos returned to his main forces at Yaguajay, he and Che mapped out a strategy for a province-wide offensive. Like an enthusiastic surgeon especially deft at amputations, Che set about systematically
severing road and railway bridges, isolating the province’s towns and garrisons and cutting them off from reinforcements. On December 16, his men blew up the principal Central Highway bridge and railway link leading east from Santa Clara, effectively separating Havana and Santa Clara from central and eastern Cuba and cutting the nation in half. These actions, together with the offensive taking place in Oriente, where llano garrisons had begun falling like dominoes to the guerrillas, made it clear the Batista regime had little time left.

For the last two weeks of December 1958, Che moved around the province attacking and capturing one garrison after the other. First, he laid siege to the strategic town of Fomento, with its military garrison, and, despite a sustained enemy air assault, secured its surrender after two days of fighting. He immediately moved on to the towns of Guayos and Cabaiguán. Guayos surrendered on December 21, Cabaiguán two days later. In Cabaiguán, Che fell off a wall and fractured his right elbow. Doctor Fernández Mell made him a splint and cast, and he carried on. His next target was Placetas, where his troops fought together with the Directorio for the first time. After a single day’s fighting, Placetas surrendered on December 23. That same day, Sancti Spíritus surrendered to Captain Armando Acosta. Meanwhile, the Second Front had finally moved into action, joining Directorio forces in a siege of Trinidad and other garrisons in the south. To the north, Camilo’s forces were closing in on the main garrison town of Yaguajay.

At some point amid the chaos and euphoria of battle, Che and Aleida became lovers. Perhaps the first to take note of the romance was Oscarito Fernández Mell, although even he could not remember when or where. “Suddenly, Aleida was with Che wherever he went, in combat, everywhere. ... They went around in the jeep together. She carried his papers for him, she washed his clothes.”

A less observant graduate of Minas del Frío, Alberto Castellanos, nearly put his foot in it. A cocksure twenty-four-year-old, Alberto had already been reprimanded by Che for prankish behavior but had nonetheless endeared himself to the
jefe
, who made him a general staff orderly. Alberto considered himself quite a lad with the ladies, and when Aleida showed up she caught his eye. Deciding to try his luck, he walked over to her and delivered a saucy
piropo
, or come-on line. Che was watching, and as soon as Castellanos had uttered the words, he realized Aleida was definitely
not
available. “From the way Che looked at me, I said to myself: ‘Beat it, Alberto, there’s nothing for you here.’”

Aleida herself recalled how it all began. One night, unable to sleep, she left her room and went outside to sit by the road. It was three or four in the morning, and the offensive was in full swing. Suddenly a jeep raced up
in the dark and came to a halt next to her. Che was at the wheel. “What are you doing here?” he asked her. “I couldn’t sleep,” she replied. “I’m going to attack Cabaiguán,” he said. “Do you want to come along?” “Sure,” she replied, and hopped into the jeep next to him. “And from that moment on,” recalled Aleida with a playful smile, “I never left his side—
or
let him out of my sight.”

Che and Aleida made an unlikely couple. Aleida came from the faction within the Cuban revolution most despised by Che. She was from the llano, she was anticommunist, and she retained many of the social prejudices she had been brought up with. Although it wasn’t a factor in these early days, things such as dress were important to her, and she shared her mother’s racial disdains. Che was a radical Communist, the archenemy of most of her colleagues. He was also famously careless about his appearance and personal hygiene and had surrounded himself with blacks and uneducated
guajiros
.

But when it came to women, especially attractive women, Che tended to put his political philosophy on hold—and Aleida March was very attractive. She was also worthy of respect. She was undeniably brave, having proved repeatedly that she knew how to face death. She also had a paradoxical personality that clearly appealed to Che. She was very shy but had an acute and earthy sense of humor. When she did speak out, she was tact-lessly sincere, much like Che himself.

After fracturing his arm, Che had made Alberto Castellanos his driver. With Alberto at the wheel, Che and Aleida roared around the province in his jeep, accompanied by his young bodyguards—Harry Villegas, Jesús “Parrita” Parra, José Argudín, and Hermes Peña. Soon, a rumor spread that Che was traveling with “three women: a blond, a black, and a
jabao
”—the last a Cuban term for a white mulatto. Aleida was obviously the blond, but sixteen-year-old Villegas, who was black and beardless, and Parrita, a white man with wild blond hair, were mortified to realize that they had been misidentified as girls. The erroneous gossip aside, what Che had created was not a harem but his own little guerrilla family. Che and Aleida played the roles of the parents, and the young guerrillas were their wayward children.

“Che knew us like parents know their children,” Villegas recalled. “He knew when we had done something naughty, when we hid something from him, when we did something wrong by accident or through mischief. And he had strict rules, which at the beginning we didn’t fully understand. For example ... he didn’t want anyone to have special privileges. If he saw I had extra food he would call me to find out where I had gotten it from or where it came from—why I had accepted it—and he called Aleida over and made her responsible to see that it didn’t happen again. Aleida helped us a lot. You could say she was like our godmother, because we were mischievous, and Che was strict, and she was the intermediary on many occasions when she evaluated the situation differently from him, and made him see he was being too severe with us.”

Che with Aleida March. They became lovers during the last weeks of the war.

Following the surrender of Placetas, Che moved north, and on Christmas Day he attacked Remedios and the port of Caibarién; both fell the next day. Villa Clara had become a chaos of defeated army troops, cheering civilians, and long-haired guerrillas racing around, while government planes kept up their strafing and bombing. By December 27 only one garrison, in the town of Camajuaní, remained between Che’s forces and Santa Clara, the capital of Las Villas and the fourth-largest city in Cuba. When the army troops fled Camajuaní without a fight, the way was clear.

The fighters were euphoric. They knew now that they were on the verge of winning the war, and maintaining troop discipline and establishing a semblance of order were among Che’s top priorities. To prevent anarchy, he had named provisional revolutionary authorities in each town he liberated and set down rules of behavior for his men. Bars and bordellos were strictly off-limits, but for many of the young guerrillas, suddenly finding themselves in towns and cities as conquering heroes after months of abstinence in the bush, the temptation to indulge themselves was too much. For the most part, they were remarkably well behaved, but invariably some succumbed to the delights on offer. On the day Remedios fell, Enrique Acevedo almost lost control of his men when a bordello owner delivered a truckload of prostitutes and a case of rum as an expression of his “admiration.”

“I watched our ambush disintegrate as furtive couples began heading to the bushes. Without thinking I yelled at the guy: ‘If you’ve done this to affect our ambush you’ll pay for it. Pick up the wagonload of whores you’ve dumped here immediately!’” Afterward Acevedo took stock and realized he had reacted just in time. “Not everyone had sinned, but maintaining order in the face of such temptation was a titanic effort.”

As Che plotted his next move, Fidel wrote him a letter by flashlight from outside the army garrison of Maffo, which his forces had been besieging for six days: “The war is won, the enemy is collapsing with a resounding crash, we have ten thousand soldiers bottled up in Oriente. Those in Camagüey have no way of escaping. All this is the result of one thing: our determined effort. ... It’s essential for you to realize that the political aspect of the battle at Las Villas [province] is fundamental.

“For the moment, it is supremely important that the advance toward Matanzas and Havana be carried out exclusively by the 26th of July forces.
Camilo’s column should be in the lead, the vanguard, to take over Havana when the dictatorship falls, if we don’t want the weapons from Camp Columbia [military headquarters] to be distributed among all the various groups, which would present a very serious problem in the future.”

Fidel was determined to prevent rivals from snatching the political spoils at the last moment. In Washington, past differences between the State Department and the CIA had been put aside, and there was now a broad consensus that Castro was too slippery to be allowed to take power. With the events of recent weeks, however, any hopes entertained by the Eisenhower administration that the November 3 elections might somehow ameliorate the Cuban crisis had vanished. Che and Camilo’s offensive moved forward in Las Villas; rebel columns were roaming throughout Oriente and Camagüey; numerous garrisons had surrendered to Raúl’s forces; Holguín’s water and electricity supply had been blown up; Santiago was under mounting pressure as rebel units probed its outskirts. At the end of November, after a bloody siege, Fidel’s forces had taken the major garrison of Guisa, and he too had moved from the mountains onto the llano.

Ambassador Smith had dutifully shuttled to Washington to seek support for President-Elect Rivero Agüero, but in vain. It was clear to all that the military situation was deteriorating rapidly, and fears were growing that Batista might not even last until the handover of power in February. Smith was instructed to tell Batista that a Rivero Agüero government could not expect Washington’s support and that he should resign immediately in favor of a civilian-military junta acceptable to the United States. Batista refused, evidently still believing he could somehow hold things together. In early December, he had rebuffed a similar petition by the CIA’s station chief in Havana and by William Pawley, a former ambassador to Cuba and founder of the national airline, Cubana de Aviación.