The truck jolted into gear and sped down the street. Olga Rodriguez gripped the rails, her hair flying in the breeze. Batista’s secret police had been running investigations of all the major revolutionaries helping the rebels. And someone had given them her name.
No one had expected this. The dark, pretty student government leader had been quiet about her anti-government activities to protect her family. For most of her student life, she had kept it that way. She had volunteered to smuggle medical supplies to the rebels only because no one suspected her as a rebel herself.
As the truck made its way toward the safe house, the driver begged her to keep down. SIM officers already had been to Olga’s school. Soon they would target her parents’ home on Calle Independencia. Olga thought about her parents, her sisters, and her cousin Gilberto, who lived with her family in the cramped little cinder-block house. She had put them all in danger.
Batista had been trying to root out the network in Santa Clara supporting the Second Front. In a new tactic, the cops were staking out the family and friends of suspects and then breaking them down through intimidation. It had never been this bad.
The truck pulled up to a house on the edge of the Central University of Las Villas in Santa Clara. The driver escorted Olga inside. For now, it would be her hiding place, but she had no guarantees about how long it would last. The cops were on a mission to hunt her down.
It wasn’t a secret that Olga was president of the student government at the teachers college, a radical school with a long history of social protest. But many people didn’t know how deeply she had delved into the cause. Not even her parents knew, nor her siblings. With every death, every missing person, Olga went deeper: another protest, another collection of money to send to the rebels. By the time she met with her fellow students, Olga herself was the topic of the meeting. They had to find a way to save her.
Olga Rodriguez, age twenty, at the Normal Teachers School in Santa Clara Courtesy of Morgan Family Collection
The cops had been working the streets, flashing Olga’s picture. They had stopped at the college, trying to shake down the principal. Soon she’d have to flee to another safe house.
Olga didn’t know that the SIM had barged into her family’s home and had torn the place apart. They searched the rooms, closets, and the yard. Olga’s mother stood by the door, trembling. She knew the cops weren’t going to rest until they found her daughter. Then they found Gilberto.
Four years older than Olga, Gilberto had lived with the family since he was a boy. He was her cousin, but he was still a family member and it was perfectly acceptable to wail on the male relatives to make a point. Two of the SIM cops found him on a street corner and demanded to know her whereabouts. Gilberto looked at both men and shook his head. He wasn’t going to give her up. They demanded to know, but Gilberto dug in. Not a word.
One of the men grabbed him from behind, while the other punched him in the face, chest, and stomach. The blows kept coming, blood gushing from his nose and mouth. The agents carried him to the car and threw him inside.
It was time to take him to the Rodriguez home. By the time Olga’s mother rushed to the door, Gilberto had crumpled to the ground, a bloody pulp.
“Gilberto!” she screamed, falling next to him. She pleaded for the cops to stop.
“This is nothing,” one said, compared to what was in store for Olga.
Olga had to leave. She needed to save herself and, more urgently, save her family. She had thought about it, and now realized she needed to make a drastic move: She had to head to the mountains. The secret police would be heading back to Olga’s home and would surely harm other family members. It was a matter of time before they found her, too.
“I need to be with the rebels,” she said.
At first, the students helping her were doubtful. Just getting her to the Escambray would be difficult, but the bigger problem was there were no women with the rebels in the mountains.
“It’s not possible,” her handler told her.
Olga pushed back. She argued that women had joined the rebels in the Sierra Maestra. If her fellow students wouldn’t help her, she’d find a way. She wasn’t going to stay.
One of the students finally agreed to talk to a faculty member in the underground movement. If they could find an escort to take her, they would allow it. But if they couldn’t, Olga had to wait.
That night, Olga closed her eyes, but sleep didn’t come easy. The hours dragged as she thought about her predicament. In just two short years, she had gone from being a student from an obscure family to a revolutionary wanted by the president’s secret police. Getting to the rebel camp would be one of the toughest journeys of her life.
First, she had to reach the foothills. The soldiers had set up checkpoints and were stopping vehicles suspected of going to the mountains to aid the rebels. Buses went to Manicaragua, but the army stopped and searched those, too. The cops had photos of her, which made the trek that much more risky. Before she did anything, she needed to change her appearance.
She grabbed a pair of scissors and went into the bathroom. With her dark hair and eyes, she had once been one of the most beautiful girls in her school. But none of that mattered anymore. As her long locks fell to her shoulders and the floor, she realized it would be a long time before she could ever come back again—if ever. The life she knew in Santa Clara was over.
Taking a bottle of hair color that a friend had left at the house, she poured it onto her head, rubbing it in. Slowly, she was looking at a new person in the mirror. Her face and hair looked different. Now all she had to do was pull a cap over her eyes.
As she finished, Olga heard a knock at the door. The students had found her escort.
“I will help you,” he said. “But you have to listen to everything I say. We don’t have much time.”
As he stepped into the house, he reached behind his waistband and pulled out a .22-caliber revolver. Olga needed to carry it where no one could find it. Without flinching, she turned around and shoved the gun into her panties. Then tucking in her shirt, she turned around again.
“I am ready,” she said.
The plan was simple. They would both board the bus, but they would do so separately and sit apart. If they were caught, Olga’s escort would fire on the soldiers so she could flee.
“It is better that you don’t even know my name,” he said.
They walked to the station, each on opposite sides of the street, and boarded the bus. As they moved down the aisle, they made sure they sat across from each other.
As the bus pulled away, she thought about her family. She never had a chance to say good-bye. She wondered whether she would ever see her mother again. Before sundown, she’d reach Manicaragua. If she was lucky, she would reach the central mountains in a day. She had taken this familiar route while carrying packages for the rebels, past the grassy acres that rolled endlessly from Santa Clara to the foothills of the Escambray.
She thought of her grandmother, Inocencia Pozo, who had fled to these same mountains a half century earlier during the war for independence. Olga would sit for hours listening to her “Mambisa” describe her own experiences as a young girl, smuggling weapons under her dress to the rebels. She was taken prisoner but ended up marrying the man who captured her, Rafael Rodriguez, a Spanish captain who stayed in Cuba after the war. He died on the day Olga was born.
The vehicle jolted as it slowed and stopped. Suddenly the door opened, and several men in uniforms boarded. Olga gasped. She didn’t know what to do. She looked over, but her escort wasn’t moving. She needed to stay calm. She needed to breathe deeply. The men walked down the aisle, staring at every passenger, one by one.
One of them came to Olga. Just stare straight ahead. No eye contact. He looked at Olga as he held up a photo. He glanced back at Olga, and then he slowly turned around and walked away.
Olga looked over at her escort. They had made it. But they also knew there were many more miles to go.
When the bus came to a halt at the next station, Olga’s escort stood and turned to her. It was time to get off. They hadn’t reached Manicaragua, but it was no longer safe for either one to be on board anymore. They bounded down the steps and began walking down the street, when Olga’s escort turned and pointed back to the vehicle. A cadre of cops waving guns had rushed inside.
Olga and her escort needed to reach a farmhouse to get help. Most of the guajiros in the area sympathized with the revolution even if they didn’t take an active role in it. Their stories were all the same. They had supported, even gushed over, Batista during his early years. But the longer he stayed in power, the more resentful they became.
When Olga and her escort reached the first farmhouse, the owner didn’t hesitate to let them come inside. He told them what they already knew: They weren’t safe. The secret police were all over the area, on horses and in trucks.
The farmer agreed to let Olga stay while her escort sent for help. She had no idea how long he would be gone, but at least she was safe for now.
For the rest of the day, she stayed, even taking time to play on the floor with the little girls who lived there. At ten o’clock that evening came a knock on the door. A messenger indicated that Olga needed to leave. Soldiers were drawing closer, searching all the farmhouses. She was in imminent danger.
A short while later, she heard noises outside. Just as the farmer was taking her out of the house, she spotted two men with long, stringy beards, clad in olive fatigues, on horses coming toward the farmhouse.
The farmer walked out to his stable—a rudimentary wood-frame structure with a roof—and led one of his own horses to Olga.
“I had never ridden on a horseback,” she recalled. “But I didn’t say anything.”
With one of the men riding in front of Olga and the other in the rear, they took off in the darkness. The area, known as Callejón del Coco, was crawling with soldiers. The barbudos knew the area well, but it was a long ride to Guanayara.
As they moved along the trail, Olga began shivering. The higher in the mountains they went, the colder the air. Olga was entering another world. Other than short trips to the farms outside Santa Clara, she had never been this far from home. Huge trees seemed to grow out of the rocks, so tall in some places that you couldn’t see anything else. The path they were riding on was so deep in the woods that the trees formed a canopy over the trail.
As they rounded a bend, Olga noticed a faint light in the distance. At first, the men thought it belonged to some peasants, but they quickly realized it was two army patrol cars set up for an ambush.
“We threw ourselves on the ground,” recalled Olga.
Suddenly their trip had taken a wrong turn. It was time to get off the horses and send them off in another direction. Now they had to walk on foot on a new path, one far longer and more treacherous. It started to drizzle. Olga was freezing. Her body ached, and her shoes had torn. Her feet bled on the rocky terrain.
“¿Estás cansada? ” one of them asked. Are you tired? Olga said no. She wanted to keep going. She didn’t know how much longer she could go, but if she could make it to morning, they stood a chance.
She began to count the trees she passed just to keep her mind from drifting off. With each one, she pretended to be that much closer to her destination. Don’t stop, she would tell herself. If she did, she might not get back up.
As the sun broke through the trees, Olga was lagging, but at least she could see better in the morning light. Just a few more hours, and they could make it to the rebels.
As they reached an area known as Escandel, Olga heard a strange noise. The men stopped. Olga watched as one of her escorts repeated the noise, cooing like a bird. Seconds later, several bearded men in olive fatigues broke from the brush.
She had arrived. This was the first camp, an outpost, the men told Olga and her escorts. The main camp lay several kilometers away.
“Venid,” one of them said—come—motioning for Olga and her handlers to follow them to an open area with a fire. The fresh aroma of thick, dark coffee hung in the air as the men gathered. Her escorts described the close call with the enemy. It appeared the soldiers were moving in Jeeps along the main roads.
Olga recalled having a strange feeling come over her. She was now with the rebels, the men fighting the war. Other than being with her family, she had never felt more at home, as if she had been gravitating toward this moment her entire life.
One of the men noticed that Olga’s feet were cracked and bleeding. “Why is this lady not wearing any shoes?” he asked. Another handed her a pair of worn leather boots. “They are not new, but I hope they will fit you,” he said.
Olga smiled. A day earlier, secret police and soldiers were hunting her, and at least now, she had survived to see another day.
But she had only a few hours to rest. Her handlers needed to get her to the main camp, Veguitas. There she would meet Menoyo and the others preparing for their first major offensive.