The sun crested over the rooftops of Santa Clara as Olga Rodriguez scurried up the steps of the crowded bus. Clutching the bag to her side, she moved to the back row, head down, and slumped in a seat.
The bus was just seventeen miles from Manicaragua, but she still had to pass by government sentries and roadblocks. She just needed to get the supplies to the rebels—medicine, food, and letters. Then she’d be able to turn around and come back.
Please, God, just get me there, she whispered.
If the Cuban government agents boarded the bus and searched the passengers, she would be yanked off the vehicle, beaten, and more than likely executed. She peeked out the window as the bus began to roll slowly out of the station. Outside, the streets, normally bustling with cars and pedestrians, were now filled with soldiers and guns.
Her friends at the Normal Teachers School in Santa Clara begged her not to do this. But with every passing day, she had been getting pulled deeper into a movement that was burrowing its way into the heart of Cuba.
She had led protests on the steps of the teachers school, where she was elected student government president in 1956. Months later, she was leading walkouts during classes.
The area surrounding Santa Clara had always been a center of political unrest, but in early 1958, it was nasty. For months, fellow students from the Student Directorio had been going missing and turning up dead, their butchered bodies found in ditches. Just weeks earlier, a seventeen-year-old friend of Olga had been tortured so badly by Batista’s secret police that his heart gave out.
She found herself roaming to places like Leoncio Vidal Caro Park, spending hours listening to people rail against the government and the leader who had been in place since Olga was born: Batista.
What a betrayal.
His name alone was enough to inflame passion among the young students who saw him as a corrupt dictator beholden to US business owners and mobsters. In his quest for power, Fulgencio Batista had cut secret deals with companies like International Telephone and Telegraph and organized crime figures like Lucky Luciano, taking kickbacks and leaving most rural Cubans to wallow in their own misery.
But Olga was oblivious to the companies or the names of American mobsters. All she knew was that Batista was basking in the glory of opulent hotels and gaming houses while just a few hundred miles away, her own people were steeped in poverty without enough medical clinics or schools.
Their biggest disappointment was that Batista had once been one of their own. A mulatto born in 1901 to a poor farming family in Banes—a town dominated by United Fruit Company—Batista knew what it meant to be exploited. And in his first term as president in 1940, he kept his promises to the poor to build schools and hospitals.
To the simple, fun-loving guajiros, Batista was like Benito Juárez—the legendary Mexican president of the nineteenth century who overthrew a corrupt regime and helped rebuild the country to its earlier glory. Batista launched massive public works projects, except none of the wealth he created trickled down to the poor, who watched as the hotels and casinos lit up the Havana skyline.
Though he was defeated for reelection, Batista wasn’t going to give up. From his palatial Florida estate, he plotted his return. In 1948, he won election as a senator, and in 1952, he led a coup to take back the presidency. This time, he returned with a vengeance, suspending the Constitution, banning labor strikes, and shutting down press freedoms. He prowled Havana “like a panther,” chewing up his adversaries.
He would unleash the dreaded SIM, his secret police, on political opponents and anyone else who mocked his authority. Tired of the abuse, the poor people and students struck back. They began forging underground alliances to rescue their country.
For Olga, her own beginnings in the movement began in her cramped, cinder-block home when her mother would cry in the darkness because she didn’t have enough to feed her five children. To Olga, her family was poor and nothing was ever going to change. As a little girl, she would watch as her parents headed to the tobacco shacks, where they would spend hours tying bundles of green leaves, barely earning enough to survive.
But it wasn’t the hunger pangs that pushed Olga to the edge of desperation. It was her little brother, Roberto, who haunted her dreams and shattered her soul. When he was just nine, he stepped on a rusty nail while trying to rescue a cat trapped under a bridge during a rainstorm. Three days later, he shook uncontrollably from an infection raging through his body. Olga’s parents managed to find someone to donate a tetanus antidote, but days later, they discovered the medicine had long expired.
As he lay in pain in bed at San Juan de Dios Hospital on December 11, 1948, Olga gave him her favorite shirt—slipping it over his shriveled body—before he took his last breath.
She remembered him being laid out in a coffin in her family’s home, her mother and sisters sobbing. Then the long walk to the cemetery—seven blocks away—and the procession of people. The entire day, she refused to cry. “When I hurt inside, I can’t cry,” she recalled.
She tried to act as though she could move on, but the pain was overwhelming, waking her up in the middle of the night. Roberto, why did you have to die?
She already knew the answer: Her people were dirt poor, living in a shack with no running water or toilet. They should have been able to buy him the proper medicine to keep him alive.
By the time Olga returned to school, she was angry. No longer was she the little girl who skipped along Calle Independencia, playing with the other children. She became withdrawn—and alone.
She began spending more time talking to dissident teachers about subjects that had never before interested her: politics and war. She knew that Fidel Castro Ruz and his 26th of July Movement were already in the Sierra Maestra mountains, four hundred miles away, leading the cause. But in Las Villas Province, in the heart of the Escambray mountains, this is where the revolution would be won.
Batista’s men, who vastly outnumbered the barbudos—the bearded revolutionaries—had armored cars, submachine guns, grenades, and even B-26 bombers, all courtesy of the American government. If the rebels didn’t get more supplies, more weapons, and soon, Batista’s men would chase them into the swamps and all would be lost.
They needed a volunteer, someone who could slip in without being caught. Olga had nothing to lose. Her brother was dead. Her family was poor. She wasn’t going to finish school. She agreed to board the bus.
She told everyone at the school that she wasn’t afraid. But she was terrified. In Havana, police attacked one protester by stripping off her clothes, holding her legs apart, and thrusting a metal rod into her vagina, nearly killing her. When SIM officers barged into her hospital room, nearly a dozen nuns gathered around her bed to protect her. Around the same time, police tortured a young man by tearing off an ear, smashing his foot, and crushing his testicles.
As Olga stared out the bus window, she could see another checkpoint in the distance. The bus began to slow down.
Just look straight ahead, she thought. She counted the seconds. They needed to keep moving. They needed to make it to Manicaragua.