The crack of gunfire prompts the mind to seek alternative explanations. “Listen to the drums!” journalist Marta Rojas exclaimed. “The marching bands must be coming! Or are those fireworks?” It was early, not yet sunrise, on the morning of July 26, 1953, Carnival in Santiago de Cuba. Carnival never sleeps, and the contest for best band between rivals Tivoli and Los Hoyos would not end until the pinning of medals later that morning. But it wasn’t drums Rojas heard. And it wasn’t fireworks. “Those are gunshots,” her colleague Panchito Cano replied. “From up the hill. Our work is done. We’re fucked.”1
Marta Rojas was twenty-two and a recent graduate of the School of Journalism at Havana University. In summer 1953, she worked as an intern for a television station covering rugby and soccer, a job she won not because she was sports-minded, she recalls, “but because I had good diction and was very pretty.” Every July, in or out of school, Rojas returned to Santiago from Havana, always making it home for Carnival. On the evening of July 25, she scooped up her boyfriend and headed out to celebrate with a group of other couples. Carnival invites flamboyance, masquerade, the exotic. That evening, Rojas went for something understated—a simple blouse and pleated skirt cinched at the waist with very deep pockets. A fateful choice.
Panchito Cano was a veteran photographer formerly on the staff of Bohemia magazine, now a stringer based in his native Santiago. That night Cano wandered the city capturing the exhilaration of Carnival for Bohemia, a prestigious assignment, which, short of a natural calamity or coup d’état, was sure to land him on the front cover. His and Rojas’s families were neighbors in Santiago. He knew about her interest in journalism. Bumping into her amid the merrymaking, he suggested she come along to help carry his equipment and provide another set of eyes. Rojas readily agreed. Bidding goodbye to her friends, she strolled off with Cano, snapping the occasional photograph while collecting Cano’s rolls of exposed film in the pockets of her skirt.
Cano did not need to know the exact nature of the gunfire to understand what it meant. Innocently, Rojas interpreted the gunshots as an opportunity. “Never mind the festivities,” she told Cano. “Let’s cover the shooting.” People ran in all directions, including fellow journalists. Some took off downhill toward the offices of the city’s leading newspaper, Diario de Cuba, in search of information. Cano and Rojas ran uphill, in the direction of the gunfire. Approaching the Moncada Barracks, Cano met a colleague who reported a mutiny in progress. As the group looked on from a distance, Rojas dashed home to assure her parents that she was okay and to request permission to return to Cano. “You’re crazy, and way too young,” they said. “This is what I went to school for,” she replied, before rejoining Cano near “Coca-Cola Post” (Post 2), named for the U.S. factory across the street from the barracks, just as the gunfire died down.
By 7 a.m. or so, a group of journalists milled around Coca-Cola Post, speculating about what had just transpired there. They were joined by members of Santiago’s civic associations as well as by curious onlookers. Military police held back the crowd, its chatter broken by an occasional pop, pop, pop. Coca-Cola Post sits at the highest point of the Moncada parade grounds, affording onlookers a decent view of the barracks. Rojas remembers seeing soldiers roughly corralling small groups of what looked like fellow soldiers. The rough treatment and occasional gunshots prompted a few journalists to try to force their way inside. Ernesto Ocaña, an eminent photographer, was struck hard by a guard. The blow sent Ocaña’s camera skidding across the pavement, where it was crushed by a heavy boot and kicked aside. “Journalists will come in when the Colonel says you can come in,” a lieutenant snapped.
“The Colonel” was Alberto del Río Chaviano, commander of Moncada, the second largest military barracks in the land. After several hours, the sporadic fire ceased and the journalists were escorted to a waiting room in the colonel’s headquarters. As their wait stretched on interminably, it dawned on some that Chaviano himself was not yet on the scene, as if sleeping off a big night out. Most of the assembled journalists recognized one another. Few if any knew Rojas, only recently a student. Cano was known to colleagues and to Chaviano’s staff as a veteran, if disheveled, professional (think “Columbo,” Rojas said, “but with a camera in his holster”). While the journalists waited, Cano absentmindedly paced the hall outside Chaviano’s office. But his antenna was out, and he caught sight of two women being fiercely interrogated in a nearby office. He urged Rojas to request permission to go to the rest room at the end of the hall to check out the scene for herself. Rojas did so, peering into the room on her way back, where she saw the women, one with her head turned, the other fixing Rojas intently with her gaze.
More time passed, until, finally, around mid-morning a soldier announced Chaviano’s arrival. The journalists filed into his office, where he recounted the morning’s events and promised a tour of the barracks. “At this point Chaviano said something strange,” Rojas remembers, that the tour was “not quite ready,” that his staff was still “preparing the theater of facts.” This expression brought to mind the staging of a Western, and of something gone terribly awry. “I knew that when a crime is involved, you touch nothing before the forensic team arrives,” Rojas said. “And yet here was Chaviano and company staging the grounds for us journalists.” Chaviano read talking points passed on from Havana: the exchange of fire was not a conflict among soldiers, but between soldiers and a group of dissidents led by Fidel Castro on behalf of deposed president Carlos Prío. The attackers had been thoroughly routed. There were nineteen soldiers killed and twenty-seven wounded. There were sixty-one dead insurgents. Curiously, and despite what the journalists saw with their own eyes, there were no survivors among the attackers besides the two women that Cano saw being interrogated and those who had retreated early in the battle.
Sixty-one dead attackers and not a single wounded. The skewed figures along with earlier reports of captives increased the journalists’ suspicion that things were not quite right. The ensuing tour magnified their disquiet. Bloody, mangled corpses littered the barracks’ stairways and floors, but the uniforms of the dead appeared clean and free of bullet holes, and many of the bodies lay amid remarkably little blood. Similarly, the boots of the dead insurgents were unlaced, as if the theater of facts had been hurriedly (and inadequately) staged. As the group led by Chaviano snaked its way around the bodies, Cano took close-ups, more convinced with each step that he was collecting evidence of a massacre. When the tour ended, the journalists were herded onto the parade ground in front of the barracks and ordered to wait once more.
By this time it was mid-afternoon. Humidity and a blistering sun transformed the barracks into a furnace. There were no trees, no shade, nowhere to escape the heat, Rojas recalls. An hour or so later, Chaviano fielded another call from Havana, and Cano surmised correctly that the message included an order to confiscate the evidence. Thinking quickly, Cano sidled up to the bed of a nearby truck and deposited his film from the theater of facts. He then approached Rojas to ask if she still had the rolls of film from the night before. When she said yes, he told her to exchange them for those he had dropped on the truck bed. Rojas did as commanded, filling her pockets with the film from the barracks. Cano then scooped up Rojas’s rolls just as one of Chaviano’s men emerged with a tray and ordered the journalists to surrender their notebooks and film. The journalists grumbled but complied, including Cano, who loaded the tray with images of Carnival.
Marta Rojas was all but ignored. No one noticed the rolls of film concealed deep within the pleats of her skirt. “After a few more hours of waiting around, we were released,” Rojas says. “We made our way down Aguilera Street to the darkroom of a friend.” The time was now nearly 6 p.m. Within hours, Cano’s sleight of hand was discovered and he immediately went into hiding. His handsome assistant was not suspected. At Cano’s insistence, Rojas returned hurriedly to Havana, where she delivered the negatives to the editor of Bohemia. By the end of the day, a strict censorship descended over Cuba preventing publication of the Moncada photographs. It was not until four and half years later—in January 1959, after the triumph of the Revolution and the flight of Fulgencio Batista—that the photographs appeared in Bohemia for all, including skeptics, to see.
The Moncada attack was inspired by the coup d’état of Senator and former president Fulgencio Batista on March 10, 1952. That spring, Batista was the trailing candidate in the upcoming presidential election. Polls suggested that victory was badly out of reach, which meant that if Batista intended to attain the presidency of Cuba once more he would have to seize it for the second time in a generation. The previous summer, Batista had been approached by a cohort of young officers disgusted by the violence and corruption of the Prío administration and asked to do just that. Batista declined, hoping to forge a populist political coalition that would sweep him to electoral victory. By February, the coalition had not emerged. Approached by his fellow officers a second time, Batista consented. In the early morning of March 10, he seized Camp Columbia, Cuba’s largest military base, located on the outskirts of Havana, while commandeering important military installations and civil institutions across the land.2
Few besides a handful of army officers saw the coup coming. In early 1952, Cuba was enduring yet another in a succession of corrupt, self-serving governments that delivered order, opportunity, and prosperity to those at the top of Cuban society, while largely neglecting the middle and lower ranks. The character of life in mid-century Cuba is captured by a 1950 World Bank study commissioned by the Cuban government and known as the Truslow Report, after its chairman, Francis Adams Truslow, president of what is now the New York Stock Exchange.3 According to the report, not much had changed in Cuba since the visit of the Commission on Cuban Affairs in 1934.4 Like its predecessor, World War II provided a timely stimulus to Cuba’s sugar economy. As before, the sugar boom continued into the postwar years, so that by 1950 Cuba boasted the third highest income per capita in Latin America (highest among the nations of the tropics). Most of that wealth was concentrated at the top of Cuban society and in the cities, especially in Havana. Most of the profit went to outside investors. The little that remained in Cuba was channeled not into new infrastructure, industries, and markets but into the pockets of the politicians and labor leaders who greased the gears of the sugar monoculture. This was a legacy of the early years of the Cuban Republic, when a shortage of capital and affordable loans steered would-be entrepreneurs into politics, corrupting the political and legal system from top to bottom, ultimately transforming politics into profiteering.
Cuba’s overreliance on sugar and end-of-nose decision making had adverse consequences for labor, education, and public health. In fact, the Truslow Report explained, Cuba’s position among Latin America’s top economic performers was misleading. If more prosperous than its neighbors, per capita income in 1950 was only slightly higher than it had been in 1920, and the nation owed its prosperity to a sugar industry that had all but ceased to grow even as Cuba’s population doubled. In the best of times, the sugar industry provided employment for between three and four months a year. In the face of an exploding population, the continued reliance on a static (if booming) sugar industry spelled trouble.
Trouble was not hard to find once you ventured off Havana’s grand boulevards into the inner city or out into the countryside. By 1950, Cuba’s vaunted public school system was teetering, thanks partly to population growth, and partly to patronage and corruption, as powerful unions ensured that teachers retained their posts irrespective of performance. In rural areas, schools were crowded, widely dispersed, and short of teachers and supplies. A visitor to a local school in Oriente Province, for example, estimated that 90 percent of the farmers in the municipality were illiterate, while only 150 of the two thousand school-aged children were enrolled in school at all. In the face of figures like these, the report predicted, “the new generation will be no better equipped educationally than the present one to cope with” the challenges of modern life. It was not that Cuban officials weren’t trying, the report emphasized, simply that “no ordinary measures” could remedy the situation and make Cuban education “what it should be.”5
Similar discrepancies afflicted public health. A wealthy Cuban or foreign tourist seeking a doctor in mid-century Havana could expect a level of care not so different from that in Sarasota, New York, or Boston. Moreover, years of assiduous work combating tropical disease had proved so successful, the report found, that tropical disease was simply “not a serious problem.” Still, overall health remained poor due to the prevalence of parasites. Parasites abounded in urban and rural Cuba alike. “It is authoritatively estimated that between 80% and 90% of the children in rural areas are infested by intestinal parasites,” the report observed. Inadequate education compounded the scourge, which local officials attributed to deficient sanitation and a contaminated water supply.6
Finally, there was the problem of malnutrition. One need not be an agronomist to recognize that Cuba is extremely fertile. The list of crops that flourish there is seemingly endless, with rich forests and grassland blanketing the island. And yet, the report noted, between 30 percent and 40 percent of Cuba’s urban population suffered from poor nutrition, over 60 percent in rural areas. Meanwhile, the nation imported virtually all it consumed. This problem, too, could be traced back to distortions of the sugar economy. Cuba’s abundant raw sugar production might have spawned all sorts of secondary industries, including “baked goods, cereal products, canned and frozen foods, preserved fruits, jams, jellies and candies.” Those not consumed at home could be marketed abroad, providing income while stimulating local industries and markets. Of course, a productive economy required still “more agricultural crops, eggs and livestock,” but surely Cuba could produce these on its own. Its inability to do so confounded the Truslow commissioners. Something was radically “amiss when one of the [world’s] richest agricultural countries” could not feed itself.7
In sum, though mid-century Cuba had much to commend it—especially in contrast to its neighbors—the nation was plagued by problems that had afflicted it for decades: rampant corruption, lack of domestic industry and markets, insufficient purchasing power, unemployment, and substandard education, health care, and nutrition, particularly in rural areas. The situation demanded deep structural change and the stakes were hard to exaggerate. If the country continued on its current path, the report warned, “control may well pass into subversive but specious hands—as it has done in other countries whose leaders have ignored the trends of the times.”8
It was precisely to save Cuba from this scenario that Fulgencio Batista ousted President Carlos Prío. Or so he claimed. At 6 p.m. on the afternoon of March 10, Batista addressed the nation, explaining that his coup was not in fact a coup at all but a “Revolution” undertaken by “patriotic” officers acting on behalf of the Cuban people. Prío had been plotting a conspiracy of his own, Batista said, and intended to remain in power indefinitely. The sole aim of the “Revolution” was to restore the rule of law and promote economic and social prosperity. The 1940 Constitution was now suspended, the Revolution itself now the law of the land. According to its law, Batista was now chief of state and head of a Council of Ministers, with complete legislative and executive authority (the role of the judiciary supposedly remained unchanged). Batista vowed to remain in power long enough to fulfill the people’s will and hold free and fair elections. Only his “love for the people” had compelled him to act, he said. “Shoulder to shoulder we must work for the spiritual harmony of the great Cuban family.”9
It is hard to say how many Cubans accepted this explanation. Censorship and a fierce crackdown on labor and student dissidents accompanied the coup. The police and the military seized control of the airwaves and occupied the usual demonstration grounds. Batista was an unlikely harbinger of revolutionary change. His former term in office was known neither for its vision nor its transparency nor for promoting spiritual harmony. When he last left office in 1944 (bound for Daytona Beach, Florida, with sacks of cash), his handpicked successor was soundly defeated in that year’s presidential election.
If unconvinced by Batista’s justification for the coup, Cubans appeared largely resigned to it. The nation responded with “a mixture of confusion, resentment, and hope,” The New York Times reported. And no little fawning. In the first few days of the new regime, Havana’s elite flocked to the Presidential Palace to salute the new chief of state.10 Meanwhile, labor and student leaders reacted with a combination of rage and incredulity. Labor quickly fell in line, exchanging a promise to halt all demonstrations for a government pledge to honor existing labor legislation. By contrast, students and young activists remained un-mollified. On University Hill, loudspeakers crackled with the defiant words of the FEU. “Once more, we are the standard bearers of the national conscience. We are defending the constitution, the people, and the democratic process.”11
In the initial hours and days following the coup, young militants waited in vain for Prío’s people to enlist them in armed resistance. For a solid week, journalist Carlos Franqui recalled, “we young people, students and revolutionaries, kept going from university to the unions, from the home of one opposition leader to another, from Ortodoxo headquarters on the Prado to the communists on Carlos III, asking them to take a stand, demanding action, strikes, protests, and demonstrations. Nothing.”12 When, by the end of a week, it became clear that neither Prío nor his party nor even the Ortodoxo leadership had anything to contribute besides hot air, young Cubans began to cast about for peers capable of exercising leadership. For nearly a year, the opposition remained as divided as Cubans themselves. But time did not diminish the revolutionary fervor. “The world changed on March 10,” former activist Rosa Mier recalled. Batista had crossed a line, and young Cuba resolved to stop him in his tracks.13
Pro-Batista officers were not the only ones who had been plotting Prío’s exit from office that winter. The question was how to accomplish this goal, by violence, or via the legal process laid out in the Cuban Constitution? Fidel Castro, for one, believed that a free press and the Cuban Constitution provided all necessary means for ousting a corrupt president. On March 3, 1952, just one week before the coup, Castro appeared before the Court of Auditors (Tribunal de Cuentas) to formally charge Prío with abusing the public trust. The Court of Auditors never reached a verdict. Batista’s coup took care of that. By this time, Castro had bigger things to worry about. Late the previous year, Castro had filed yet another criminal complaint on behalf of the family of deceased transit worker Carlos Rodríguez, accusing police lieutenant Salas Cañizares of Rodríguez’s murder. This time, Salas Cañizares was found guilty, put on probation, and fined 500 pesos. In one of his first acts in power, Batista promoted Salas Cañizares to the post of chief of police, and Salas Cañizares was known to be out for revenge.
Castro spent the night of March 9–10 at his apartment in Vedado. News of the coup sent him scrambling, first to the home of his half-sister, Lidia, a dissident in her own right, then to the Andino Hotel, a former residence near the university. At Lidia’s, he ran into fellow activist René Rodríguez, who would serve as his eyes and ears over the next several days.14 With Rodríguez doing the legwork, Castro canvassed officials in the deposed Prío government to discover their plans for armed resistance. Though Castro loathed Prío, there was no question in his mind that Batista was the graver danger. It simply never occurred to him that Auténtico leaders would treat the coup as a fait accompli. At the university, students were approached not by the ousted president’s people but by Rolando Masferrer, who warned them that they were being watched. Castro dispatched Rodríguez to the home of Ortodoxo leader and presidential candidate Roberto Agramonte, who laid out the party’s plans for civil resistance. Civil resistance? Castro asked on Rodríguez’s return. Batista knew but one language: brute force. With every passing second, his grip on the country tightened. Time was running out.
Castro abandoned the Andino Hotel the following day for the home of his friend Eva Jiménez in the Havana suburb of Marianao. In a cubicle off Jiménez’s kitchen, he set to work drafting his response to the coup entitled, “Revolution, no! Usurpation,” a ringing defense of constitutionalism over brute force, which he then delivered to Alerta editor Ramón Vasconcelas. Under pressure from Batista’s censors and Ortodoxo officials alike, Vasconcelas declined the piece, but not before calling Castro “the last hope of the Cuban people.”15
Within a few days, Salas Cañizares announced that Castro had nothing to fear from him, easing concern about Castro’s safety. Freed from hiding, he raced from place to place, consulting fellow militants about a joint response. With the opposition stymied, Castro took things into his own hands. At a rally at Colón Cemetery, Emilio Ochoa, civil resister in chief, outlined the Ortodoxo Party’s official policy. In the middle of Ochoa’s speech, Castro mounted a nearby tomb, decried the party’s passivity, and called for armed resistance. “Who in the world is that?” murmured voices in the crowd. “Fidel Castro,” others replied. The crowd began to show its support for Castro just as the police closed in. Their path was blocked by a phalanx of Ortodoxo women no less exasperated by the party’s submission. Castro escaped and violence was averted. But partisans of armed resistance within Ortodoxo ranks had thrown down the gauntlet, and the influence of the old guard would never be the same.16
On March 24, Castro tried another tack, filing suit against Batista before Havana’s Court of Appeals. He was not the only person to do so. Veteran politicians Eduardo Suárez Rivas and Pelayo Cuervo Navarro filed a suit of their own in the Supreme Court, only to see their case thrown out in early April. Castro challenged the magistrates to apply existing laws. By setting aside the Constitution and the rule of law, Batista exposed Cubans’ lives and property “to the whims of bayonets,” he said. All the safeguards that stood between liberty and tyranny went the way of the Constitution. Batista was now distributing administrative posts like party favors, replacing the popular will with “a juridical farce created in the barracks behind the back of popular opinion.”
However distressing, these developments had been anticipated by the drafters of the 1940 Constitution. Castro cited six articles that condemned the perpetrator to at least a hundred years in prison. In his post-coup address to the nation, Batista had argued that his takeover was not a coup at all, but a revolution. In fact, Castro said, it was a “restoration . . . to barbarity and brute force.” Anticipating a claim he would make years later, Castro insisted that revolutionary force was something altogether different, animated by the public will and fueled by popular participation. Batista mobilized no public, broached no arguments, advanced no revolutionary vision. The coup lacked what Castro called “revolution generating right”—a new conception of the nation “based in deeply rooted historical and philosophic principles.”
Batista had also claimed that his coup would not affect the judicial branch. This suit would be a test case, Castro told the court. The judges faced a simple choice: they could defend the rule of law and acknowledge Batista as the mockery that he was, or hang up their robes and go home. Surely, they would not allow some bayonet-wielding corporal to defile “the august courtroom of the magistrates.”17
This lawsuit, too, was thrown out, Castro’s response to the coup largely ignored by a press fixated on the conciliatory gestures of leading political figures. In spring 1952, Castro was still relatively unknown outside student (and police) circles. Though an Ortodoxo delegate and candidate for representative, he lacked a platform within the party from which to make his opinions known. Still, he repeatedly stuck his neck out, continuing to draw attention to himself through gestures big and small.
Among those impressed by Castro that spring was Rosa Mier, a young woman whose politicization reveals the two or three degrees of separation linking dedicated militants in mid-century Cuba. Mier was twenty-four at the time of the coup, a town councilor from the village of Guanajay, some thirty miles southwest of the capital. She lived with her parents, members of the ruling Auténtico Party, whom she describes as “well off and apolitical.” As a child, Mier went to private schools and attended the University of Havana. In Guanajay, as in Cuba generally, Batista’s coup was greeted with a collective shrug. “People were passive,” Mier explains. “There was little surprise and widespread acceptance.” And why not? What did it matter if Cuba were ruled by this corrupt official versus that one? Batista had anticipated this response, and his future depended on it. What he had not considered, Mier says, is that in Cuba “there are always a few people ready to stand up for right.”18
Introduced to Castro through fellow female activists, Mier came to know him well. In group settings, Mier reports, Castro was “overpowering, infatuating, irresistible, radiating authority and confidence.” In person, he was warm, kindhearted, and authentic. He was also inveterately curious and could be very playful. Mier encountered the playful side of Castro through a stroke of serendipity. As a member of Guanajay’s town council, she had access to the office of the local newspaper, El Heraldo, which she used to produce documents for what was coming to be known as the Movement, a dissident group centered on Castro and a few others, described below. One day Mier was scheduled to travel to Guanajay to pick up a run of pamphlets. At the last moment, her car broke down, prompting Castro to offer her a lift. He, too, had business in Guanajay, he said, and suggested they take his car.
Arriving in town, they went first to the printer, where Mier picked up her pamphlets. Thinking to stash them in the trunk of Castro’s car, she discovered ten thousand copies of the radical newspaper El Acusador “just sitting there.” If Castro were caught with these, she knew, that could be the end of him, and yet there he was, cool as a midnight swim, utterly imperturbable. Tickled to be in Castro’s presence for the day, Mier insisted on introducing him to a few friends. First, they visited her uncle, owner of a local bakery. Needing to safeguard her documents, she then drove Castro to her home, which he examined in loving detail. “He was so interested, so impressed,” she said, “and he asked me my birthday.” July 5, 1927, she replied. “He started counting with those piano-player fingers of his, and I said to myself, what’s he doing, this man with so much intelligence?” After a brief pause, Castro burst out, “I am eleven months your senior!” Castro was clearly enjoying himself and appeared to be in no hurry. Mier then took him to meet her family doctor and fellow town councilor, Alberto Nuevo. “I have met an extraordinary man,” she told her friend. Within minutes Castro and Nuevo were referring to one another by their first names. Within the hour, the three had retreated to the doctor’s office, where he opened a bottle of champagne.
The day passed in a blur. After more visits and more drinks (and, this being Cuba, no little coffee), it was time to return to Havana. The two had enjoyed themselves so much that they had forgotten to take time to eat. The alternating alcohol and coffee had left Castro exhausted. “Look,” he said, “I’m too tired. Everywhere we go we get wine and coffee but no food. Now YOU will drive.” Mier got into the driver’s seat, more than a little nervous, she said, as “Cuban men never let women drive.” On the way home, they stopped by a roadside stand for a quick sandwich. They had no money but for a few pesos a colleague had given Castro to pay for gas. Flushed by the day’s events, Mier took a chance, asking Castro to dance. “I don’t know how to dance,” he replied, visibly upset. “So, we just ate,” she said. “Fidel doesn’t have a musical ear.”
No, but he had an eye for injustice and continued to expand his circle by intervening when others simply looked the other way. Later that year, Castro attended a meeting of fellow conspirators in the city of Matanzas, forty miles east of Havana. While there, he learned about the plight of workers on a nearby farm uncompensated for months of labor. So he paid the farm a visit, introduced himself as a lawyer, and said he wanted to help. Several of the men remembered greeting Castro with skepticism. “Sure,” the men responded, “like all lawyers.” Castro insisted that he was not like most lawyers and asked to speak to their leader. After a few minutes, a young man approached, seemingly little more than a teenager but actually a local labor representative named Paulino Perdomo Ramos. Perdomo was no less suspicious of the interloper than his companions, but Castro convinced Perdomo to hear him out.19
An impromptu meeting was called at Perdomo’s house. Castro introduced himself once more, promising on his word of honor to deliver the overdue wages within four days. But he could only do so, he explained, if the men signed off on his representation. “Listen, lawyer,” Perdomo said, “this business of your word of honor has little currency with us. In truth, we don’t know the meaning of the word; it’s been beaten out of us.” Not one to give up easily, Castro persisted and at last the men agreed. Castro drove away telling the men to expect an update within two days. One of the workers, Anisio Ruiz, remembered the men scratching their heads in astonishment. “ ‘Who is this guy?’ we asked one another. ‘Where did he come from?’ ” The men had gone six months without hope. And then “this apparition appeared and charged us nothing.”20
Two days later, a telegram arrived, prompting Perdomo to remark, “this guy may be for real.” Two days after that, a car pulled up at the farm driven by Castro and missing one of its front doors. Castro leaped out, dressed in his signature pinstripe suit, a yellow envelope in hand. Not only had he recovered the men’s wages, he told the workers, but he had resolved the dispute that precipitated the problem in the first place. The men insisted Castro accept payment for his services (a few pesos, some gas, a beer). Castro wouldn’t hear of it. Looking back on the episode years later, one of the men, Dimas Carmona, remembered being amazed by a young lawyer’s disinterest. “He did this for nothing,” Carmona said. He alone received 500 pesos in back pay. The relief could not have come at a better time. “Castro saved my holiday.”21
Meanwhile, Castro continued to conspire with fellow militants. On May 1, 1952, he attended a vigil commemorating the death of activist Carlos Rodríguez at the hands of Batista’s police. There he met Jesús Montané and Abel Santamaría, young members of an Ortodoxo cell centered on Santamaría’s home in Vedado. Montané was a manager at General Motors in Havana, Santamaría an accountant at Pontiac. The two were among the first to mobilize in the aftermath of the coup, combining with journalist Raúl Gómez García to produce an underground weekly, whose name, They’re All the Same (Son los mismos), spoke to the conviction of many dissidents that if Batista was worse than his predecessors, it was only by degree.
Castro envied Montané’s and Santamaría’s success at getting their message out in print. Montané remembers thinking that in Castro the opposition might just have found its leader. Castro was “the only one capable of really getting the movement going,” Santamaría told a friend. Other activists described Santamaría in the exact same way (“just the person we’ve been looking for,” said Melba Hernández). Castro and Santamaría complemented one another, with Santamaría’s thoughtfulness a nice balance to Castro’s charisma. At the same rally, Castro learned about a small ham radio in the possession of an Ortodoxo physician and inveterate tinkerer named Mario Muñoz, from the city of Colón. Castro quickly made arrangements to visit the doctor to see about borrowing his equipment. Ten days later, the transmitter was in place atop the roof of the School of Engineering, providing live coverage of yet another antigovernment demonstration. Its limited range did not moderate the enthusiasm of the crowd, which regarded the broadcast as a symbol that a true opposition was at long last taking shape.22
As summer yielded to fall, militant cells began to form in cities, villages, and towns across the country. The University of Havana remained a focal point. Carmen Castro, a young dissident, remembers the university becoming a “veritable beehive of patriotism,” with some of the students engaged in strategizing, others immersed in weapons training. Castro approached the students in charge of the latter, Pedro Miret and Lester Rodríguez, to see about combining forces. Miret and Rodríguez agreed, and before long they were leading as many as twelve hundred dissidents in the fine points of assembling and disassembling M1 and Springfield rifles and operating mortars. From there, the dissidents graduated to live-fire exercises conducted at ranges throughout the city and surrounding countryside. Disguised as “upstanding members of the bourgeoisie,” as Castro put it, the would-be combatants registered in hunting clubs and took up clay pigeon shooting. This was all perfectly legal, Castro emphasized, and Batista’s police had bigger fish to fry. “They knew we didn’t have a cent.”23
As his activities increased, Castro began to attract unwanted attention. In early February 1953, dissidents flocked to the Colón Cemetery to bury a young student named Rubén Batista, gravely injured by police the previous month. At the head of the demonstration marched the Frente Cívico de Mujeres Martianas (the Civic Front of Martían Women, known colloquially as the Mujeres Martianas), a coalition that included Castro’s new friend Rosa Mier, as well as Pastorita Nuñez, Aida Pelayo, and Carmen Castro, all of whom would play significant roles in the ensuing revolution. The women carried an immense banner emblazoned with the words, “The Blood of the Good Shall Not Be Shed in Vain.” Behind the banner came the slain boy’s family and a large group of armed activists who expected to be confronted by police. They were not disappointed. When the funeral was over, the police moved in looking for Pelayo and Castro, who were thought to be behind the demonstration. Both escaped, disappearing into the protective crowd. The intervention by police turned up the tension, and the demonstrators headed back toward the university chanting “Down with tyranny! Death to Batista!”
Passing the opulent house of a Batista supporter, its fences festooned with images of the dictator, the crowd erupted, ripping down posters and overturning cars. The police dispersed the marchers by firing shots into the air. Desperate for a scapegoat, the authorities blamed the disturbance on “Ortodoxo militants led by the doctor Fidel Castro.” In fact, thousands of witnesses placed Castro at the cemetery, blocks away from the riot.24 A few days later, journalist José Pardo Llada attributed the government’s accusation against Castro as an attempt to sow fear and confusion and thereby justify future aggressions against young activists. Castro was making waves.25
March 1953 was as quiet as January and February were raucous. For nearly a year, Castro had approached militants of various parties urging them to join him in a campaign to oust Batista by force. “We began to recruit and train men not in order to make a revolution,” he told an interviewer years later, “but rather to engage in a struggle along with others.”26 With the anniversary of the coup fast approaching and Batista looking more entrenched than ever, Castro, Santamaría, and their circle resolved to go it alone. This necessitated a shift in strategy from simply raising hell to developing a feasible plan to overthrow the government. This, in turn, meant raising money, identifying and training combatants, and gathering arms, all the while maintaining secrecy in a community riddled by hacks and government infiltrators.
The new direction called for discretion rather than publicity, launching Castro on a new path for which he had little experience. A quiet Castro was grounds for suspicion, and Batista’s agents might have devoted more attention to him during this stage but for rumors circulating in army headquarters of several other insurgencies brewing both inside and outside Cuba. In early March, Rafael García Bárcena, a popular philosophy professor at the Superior War College, apprised Castro that he planned to launch an assault on Camp Columbia, the nation’s largest military barracks, just outside Havana. Right, Castro said, everybody who was anybody knew that, including rival action groups, Batista’s police, and the U.S. embassy.27 Bárcena shrugged off Castro’s warning and carried on, eventually selecting Easter Sunday, April 5, 1953, as D-day. Castro, anticipating a fiasco, evacuated the capital, counseling other Movement leaders to lie low. Predictably, on Easter morning, Bárcena and his group were arrested and his conspiracy crushed. Bárcena was tried and sentenced to two years in prison. Years later, Castro said he might have welcomed the prospect of working with the renegade professor, had he reached out to no one else. Ecumenical and inclusive by nature, Bárcena insisted on consulting others; the result was “the most publicized action in Cuban history.”28
Barcena’s collapse was Castro’s boon. Not only did it confirm Castro’s instincts about the need for secrecy, but Castro picked up a core of disciplined activists still committed to overthrowing Batista. Castro gleaned another important lesson from Bárcena’s foiled conspiracy. He had competition, and there was no time to waste. He stepped up his fundraising while infiltrating other dissident groups in an attempt to appropriate their arms.
Rumors abounded that spring and early summer of conspiracies hatching and exposed—and of weapons caches washing up along Cuba’s coast. Some of the threats were undoubtedly hyped by the government to justify its crackdown on dissidents. Evidence of the government’s genuine concern is discernible in the fact that it seems to have taken its eyes off Castro and company. The Movement’s immediate need was money. One of its emerging ranks, an accountant named Raúl Martínez Ararás, was friends with Ortodoxo senator José Gutiérrez Planes, a militant with deep pockets. Martínez and Castro visited Gutiérrez at his home in Matanzas. Over the course of a long conversation, Castro convinced Gutiérrez of his capability and vision. The next week Gutiérrez sent Castro a check for 5,000 pesos, later providing access to other wealthy friends.29
It was not just the rich who contributed to the Movement. Castro’s foot soldiers came up with everything they could. Jesús Montané contributed $4,000 of severance pay from his job at General Motors, which had recently closed up shop in Cuba. Ernesto Tizol mortgaged his chicken farm. Oscar Alcalde mortgaged his laboratory and liquidated his accounting business. Renato Guitart donated $1,000. Pedro Marrero sold his furniture and refrigerator. The list goes on.30 Estimates of the amount raised by the rebels fall between $16,000 and $35,000. Critics say that Alcalde, among others, stole from his employer to fund the Moncada attack. Castro insisted that all the money was meant to be repaid.31
The Movement’s fundraising was impressive, especially given the donor pool. Still, whether $16,000 or $35,000 (or somewhere in between), this was not a sum of which militant dreams are made. In the immediate aftermath of the Moncada attack, Colonel Chaviano described the insurgents’ weapons as state-of-the-art instruments of war. In fact, their weapons could not have been more rudimentary. Castro later listed one (broken) machine gun, three Winchester rifles (“from the time of Buffalo Bill”), and a motley collection of low-caliber pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Two of the three Winchesters came from the Castro home in Birán.32 Castro’s evolving plans involved a group of combatants, posing as Cuban soldiers, staging a surprise attack on one or more military garrisons. This required uniforms, which Castro attained through an orderly at Camp Columbia, who raided the laundry and bought surplus outfits from soldiers looking to make some cash.33
After procuring weapons and uniforms, Castro’s next task was to identify a feasible target. Even with the element of surprise and despite his military connections, Bárcena had stood little chance of commandeering the garrison at Camp Columbia, home to the nation’s arsenal and seat of military power. With his meager budget and rudimentary weapons, Castro could not even fantasize about such a strike. He fixed his gaze on two isolated garrisons in Oriente, Santiago de Cuba’s Moncada Barracks and army headquarters in Bayamo. The nation’s second largest military installation, Moncada paled by comparison to Camp Columbia, and it looked to be an inviting target. The capture of Moncada would provide Castro the keys to the city and potentially the east, so long as the attackers could cut off access from the rest of Cuba. Which is where Bayamo fit in. The city is situated along the Río Cauto, one of the principal communication routes connecting Oriente Province to the rest of Cuba. With control of the Bayamo garrison, the rebels might sever communication, leaving the province in rebel hands. Oriente was also symbolically and culturally strategic. Virtually every rebellion ever launched in Cuba began there, its isolation, geography, and climate providing a safe harbor for individuals out of favor in the capital. In sum, Castro later remarked, Oriente was “a logical place to strike”—“hot humid, and languid,” hence “more likely to be caught off guard.”34
By early summer 1953, Cuban intelligence officials were monitoring chatter about an impending attack on Oriente, perhaps even on the Moncada Barracks. The rumors emanated not from Havana, but from Montreal, Canada, and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where former president Carlos Prío convened a meeting of displaced Auténtico and Ortodoxo party leaders, including Emilio Ochoa and José Pardo Llada. By the so-called Montreal Pact of June 2, 1953, the conferees pledged to oust Batista, establish a provisional government, and restore the 1940 Constitution. To young dissidents looking on from Havana, the significance of the pact lay not in its program, which was essentially meaningless without a method of toppling the dictator, but in its confirmation that little or nothing separated Auténtico from Ortodoxo party leadership. Santamaría and Montané had gotten it right: son los mismos—the politicians really were the same. But were they? The Montreal Pact signatories were no less committed than the other groups to the use of force. With Prío providing the financial backing, Ochoa and Pardo Llada reached out to army and navy officers thought to be wary of Batista and willing to lend their support for a violent overthrow.
And they were not the only ones. In June and early July, newspapers in Cuba and New York claimed to possess evidence of insurgents amassing in training camps across the Caribbean Basin. The Batista government took the rumors seriously. In June, guards at the Moncada Barracks were put through their paces, as the government scoured the coastline for more weapons dumps. News of an impending invasion led Castro to expedite his plans. In May, he had set a launch date of Sunday, July 26, 1953, which coincided with the celebration of Carnival in Santiago de Cuba, a favored distraction for insurgent forces across the centuries. With Cubans flocking to Santiago from all over the country, who would notice a few cars full of gun-toting guerrillas?
Castro’s idea was to take the Moncada and Bayamo garrisons simultaneously by surprise, avoiding a firefight which the rebels would surely lose. In the event of a firefight, the rebels would be able to distinguish one another from the soldiers by their shoes—which were not “military-issue,” Castro later noted, but “low-cut street shoes.”35 Castro assumed that if he and his men could disarm the Moncada Barracks, he could appeal to the soldiers to join the campaign against the dictator. The city and nation would then learn about the events via a radio broadcast that included Castro reciting Chibás’s last speech. With both Moncada and Bayamo in rebel hands, he would put “the Cuban people immediately on a war footing.”36
In Santiago, much of the logistics burden fell on the shoulders of Renato Guitart. Castro had met Guitart at Rubén Batista’s bedside vigil the previous winter. The two hit it off immediately and spent much of the succeeding evening in conversation. Guitart returned to Santiago committed to Castro and his revolutionary vision. “I went to the hospital to see Rubén and there I met a guy who is a phenomenon, what a mentality!” Guitart told his father upon returning home. “How active! That man is a revolutionary, dad! He has a forceful personality, and lives very much in the future. A man like that is only born every 500 years!”37 Castro was equally impressed by Guitart. At the time they met, Guitart was a member of Justo Carrillo Hernández’s dissident group, Liberating Action. Castro asked Guitart to approach Carrillo about combining forces. Carrillo declined, but Guitart came on board. In planning the assault on Moncada, Guitart was the only person in Santiago whom Castro trusted with the details, assigning him to provide intelligence on the attack site and to carry out necessary arrangements.
In May, Castro dispatched Oscar Alcalde, treasurer of the Movement, to Santiago to gather evidence about the Moncada Barracks. Ingratiating himself with soldiers at the various guard posts, Alcalde derived a rudimentary sense of the lay of the land. A few days later, Castro traveled to Santiago with Raúl Martínez and Ernesto Tizol in search of a safe house in which to store guns and ammunition. After scouring the region for several days, they came upon a farmhouse on the coast road east of Santiago near the town of Siboney. Tizol was a chicken farmer and the idea was to persuade the owner to rent the property, Casa Blanca, for his chicken enterprise. After much persuading, the owner agreed. In mid-June, Abel Santamaría moved out to the “chicken farm,” setting to work on alterations designed to disguise its real use. This included erecting a wall between the road fronting the house and a parking lot and reinforcing a fifteen-foot well in which the militants would store guns and ammunition. Meanwhile, Guitart rented properties in Santiago and Bayamo to house guerrillas in transit and to store still more guns, ammunition, and uniforms, which began to arrive in the east via automobile, train, and bus. Guitart also outfitted these properties with refrigerators and collapsible beds.
Despite the accelerating pace of preparations, Castro checked in on his family whenever he could. His younger sister, Enma, attended the elite Colegio de las Ursulinas in Havana, and was due to graduate on June 12. A week or so before, Castro dropped in on Enma to offer his congratulations. “I graduate on the twelfth!” Enma remembers telling her brother. “Yes, I promise to come!” Castro assured her. Raúl Castro, just back from a student congress in Vienna and a tour of Eastern Bloc countries, attended the graduation. His brother did not make it. Immediately after graduating, Enma Castro returned to Birán. Her father asked if she had seen Fidel. Yes, she had seen him, and all was well. “Something tells me he’s up to something,” Ángel remarked. “Tell him to stop conspiring and start working! I’m not sending him any more money.”38
Raúl Castro’s trip abroad meant that he figured little in preparations for the attack. In fact, he nearly missed being able to participate at all thanks to some rough treatment meted out to him by Batista’s police upon his return from the communist bloc. Stepping off the boat at the beginning of the month, he and two Guatemalans, both students, were detained by Cuban intelligence officials, interrogated, and thoroughly searched. Afterward they were taken to the city jail, Castillo del Príncipe, where they were brutally beaten by a group of prisoners egged on by the police. The incident sparked a vehement protest at Havana University, where Raúl Castro was enrolled in the Law School.39
By mid-July, people, arms, ammunition, and supplies were heading east. On the 22nd, Haydée Santamaría, Abel’s sister, left Havana by train bound for Santiago de Cuba with two suitcases bursting with guns and uniforms. Two days later, Melba Hernández followed suit, her own baggage loaded with contraband. In Santiago, Guitart, who knew the city best, dashed about purchasing food, fuel, and other necessities required to feed the commandos, finish their uniforms, and send them on their way. Castro himself remained in Havana until the day before the attack. Crisscrossing the city and province, he chased down cell leaders, ordering them to collect their men and deliver them to established checkpoints. He then sent the men on to Santiago, one group at a time. The government-imposed state of alert made the process of gathering and dispatching the cells tricky to say the least. In the furious days leading up to the attack, not a single one of the recruits was picked up on charges of suspicious activity, though Gildo Fleitas and Melba Hernández were arrested and held for three days on weapons charges after getting in a car accident.40
Cuban intelligence had an inkling that something was up. On or around July 22, the Servicio Inteligencia Militar (SIM) received news of a cache of weapons accumulating in a town east of Santiago. The next day, the queries of SIM Lieutenant Armando Acosta Sánchez were brushed off by Colonel Chaviano, chief of the Moncada garrison. “I am in charge here and I know everything that happens,” Chaviano told Acosta. “There is nothing unusual going on.” Chaviano’s arrogance did not end the rumors, some of which had camouflaged insurgents launching an attack on the garrison. Taking its lead from Chaviano, government authorities more or less shrugged off the threat, only slightly increasing the guard at Moncada.
Thanks to the strict discipline maintained in the cell system, most of the men sent to Oriente did not know where they were headed or what they would be asked to do. Juan Almeida, for instance, thought he was bound for Carnival for some well-earned rest and relaxation. Telegraph operator Manuel Lorenzo was simply asked to come along for an important job in the east. In the week after the attack, Raúl Castro told his sister Juanita that the insurgents committed “to fight the dictator, but without knowing the objective each would have.” The point was that no one should possess any more information than was essential to their specific task.41 Friends and neighbors were not to be trusted. “Batista’s people were everywhere and the smallest error could sink the entire operation.” One of the last stops Castro made was at the home of his friend and contributor Naty Revuelta, whom he had charged with producing a stencil copy of the Moncada Manifesto to be distributed to newspapers and radio stations as the attack was taking place.42
Manifesto in hand, Castro began a helter-skelter drive to Bayamo and Santiago, via Matanzas, Colón, Santa Clara, Placetas, Cabaiguán, Sancti Spíritus, Ciego de Ávila, Florida, and Camagüey, taking care of last-minute details, making sure that men and materials were on their way. He arrived in Bayamo at sunset on Saturday, where he checked in on an assault group at the Gran Casino hotel. On the way to Santiago, he and his driver, Teodulio Mitchell, were detained at an army checkpoint near the town of Palma Soriano. Mitchell recognized the soldier who pulled them over. This was Castro’s lucky day: a friendly salute, a fraternal wave, and the two were on their way. Past midnight and with less than five hours to go before the attack, the two descended the hilly highway into Santiago de Cuba.
By shortly after midnight, Carnival is on full boil. Leaving their car, Castro and Mitchell disappeared into the crowd, grateful for the anonymity. Within minutes, the two were greeted by a conga line in which waddled the portly and affable Gildo Fleitas, who had missed a rendezvous earlier that day, and whose well-being had become a source of consternation. Just a mechanical problem, Fleitas assured a relieved Castro. Castro was quickly surrounded by a group of revelers only recently arrived in the east and who had no knowledge of the mission that awaited them. Among the merrymakers was Dr. Muñoz, the ham radio operator and mechanical tinkerer first drawn to Castro’s attention the previous May. Catching word of an adventure whose details he could not fathom, Muñoz signed on that very day, journeying the six hundred kilometers from his home in Colón to the eastern capital. “Has zero hour arrived?” Muñoz wanted to know. “Yes, doctor,” Castro replied. “It’s zero hour.” “Congratulations!” Muñoz exclaimed. “What a day you’ve picked! I’m forty-one years old today, and I’m placing those years in the hands of a 26-year-old!”
On Saturday night, July 25, 1953, the rebels pulled out of Santiago at around 10 p.m., bound for Siboney and Villa Blanca. Most of the men still did not know the nature of their mission. Castro arrived in Siboney around 10:30 p.m. Weapons were withdrawn from the dry well outside the farmhouse and laid out on a bedroom floor. Uniforms were dropped down from a trapdoor in the attic, with last-minute adjustments made and ironing done by Haydée Santamaría and Melba Hernández, the only women in the group. The rebels’ cache consisted of forty shotguns, thirty-five .22-caliber rifles, sixty handguns, twenty-four assorted-caliber rifles (twelve of them dating from the turn of the century), one .30-caliber M1 Garand rifle, and an unusable .45-caliber machine gun.43
Castro ordered the men to bed and headed back to Santiago. He returned to Siboney and Villa Blanca two hours later to begin final preparations for the assault. Uniforms were distributed amid much fuss about sizing and military insignia. Fed up by the bickering, Castro ordered everyone to turn in the uniforms, at which point they were redistributed by those with some knowledge of sizing. The distribution of weapons created excitement for some, consternation for others. Those who knew a weapon of war from a curio found the group’s arsenal laughable. Ammunition was scarce, many of the guns antique, and some of the “commandos” had never fired a shot.
The time had come for Castro to reveal his plan. “We’re going to attack the Moncada Barracks,” he began. “It will be a surprise attack. It shouldn’t take more than ten minutes.”44 As Castro spoke, a rough outline of the barracks was pinned to the wall. Arriving in Santiago from the east, the rebel caravan would depart the Siboney road at a traffic circle at the intersection of Avenida de Americas and Avenida Victoriano Garzón. Taking the fourth (not the third!) exit in the traffic circle, the cars would emerge on Avenida Victoriano Garzón, proceeding less than a mile to a right turn on Avenida Moncada. Leaving the military hospital on the left and the officers’ quarters on the right, the cars would proceed five hundred meters to Post No. 3, where, if all went according to plan, the rebels’ uniforms would confuse the guards long enough to allow them to disarm two sentries, storm the barracks, seize the weapons, and capture the somnambulant soldiers.
Meanwhile a second group would occupy the Saturnino Lora Civil Hospital, whose roof and windows commanded the rear entrances to the barracks, thus allowing the rebels to cut off any escape. A third group would do the same at the nearby Palace of Justice, whose commanding position in the neighborhood afforded occupants a favorable vantage on the surroundings. With the barracks and its three thousand modern weapons in rebel control, the attackers would then commandeer the communications center and proclaim yet another “Sergeants’ Revolt,” this one committed to the good of Cuba. The news would sow chaos in military ranks throughout the country, buying time for the rebels to consolidate their position. “Our plan was to immediately get the weapons out of Moncada,” Castro later explained, “and distribute them to various buildings across the city.” With the railway lines cut, the only plausible source of military support was from the air or via the Central Highway, which the Bayamo garrison attackers had been assigned to cut. After securing Santiago de Cuba, the rebels would reveal their true identity and motivation to the city and the nation, broadcasting a recording of Chibás’s last words, along with the Cuban national anthem and a bracing hit parade. The nation would rise up in support of the Revolution and its premise, namely, that there was indeed “such a thing as sovereignty on this planet,” and that sovereignty was “a real, respected right after the two Wars of Independence in our nation.”45