The new year began on a sour note. “Get moving and do it fast,” Army Chief of Staff Francisco Tabernilla ordered his subordinate, Alberto Chaviano. By “it,” Tabernilla meant the assassination of Armando Hart, Javier Pazos, and Tony Buch, who had been picked up by the army on their way down from the Sierra Maestra after a month with the rebel commander in chief. “These degenerates mobilize quickly and they mustn’t learn of this,” Tabernilla remarked. Chaviano should stage an incident to cover up the murders.1
But the rebels had learned of the arrest as it was occurring over phone lines tapped by agents working at the Cuban Telephone Company. They quickly notified Pazos’s father, the banker, who contacted Batista and insisted he ensure the captives’ lives. Meanwhile, the rebels commandeered the radio station at Vista Alegre (in the hills above Santiago), and announced the government’s intention to commit murder. Within minutes, rebel agents intercepted another call from Tabernilla to Chaviano, ordering that Pazos’s life be spared while demanding that the others be dispatched quickly (“Armando like a dog”). Too late, Chaviano replied. The news was already out. The men were on the way to Boniato prison.
Castro experienced Hart’s arrest “like a bomb going off.” Not only was he fond of Hart, more valuable to the Movement than ever after País’s death, but Hart possessed a letter from Castro to Guevara on the subject of Guevara’s communism. Castro and Hart had had a few long conversations on the topic in the mountains, and Castro wanted to share Hart’s objections to the Argentine’s theories. The letter also mentioned Raúl Castro’s communist leanings, making it a propaganda bonanza for the Batista government, which wasted no time putting it to good effect.2
Looking back on the event years later, Hart recalled Haydée Santamaría being asked by one of her contacts at the U.S. consulate why Hart appeared so agitated about communist infiltration in the Movement if its leaders were averse to communism, as they had so strenuously maintained. Hart was criticizing Soviet communism, not Guevara’s, Santamaría responded unpersuasively. In retrospect, Hart claimed that Guevara was simply ahead of the curve in anticipating Cuba’s future direction. His own difference with Guevara was not about socialism, he insisted, but about whether existing models of communism addressed the problems of Latin America. Castro seems to have remained neutral between his two friends, as if his own mind was not yet made up.3
Much ink has been spilled about the nature and timing of Castro’s conversion from liberal nationalism to communism. There is no evidence that this conversion took place before the triumph of the Revolution on January 1, 1959. “If you ask me whether I consider myself a revolutionary at the time I was in the mountains,” Castro told journalist Lee Lockwood a few years later, “I would answer yes, I considered myself a revolutionary. If you asked me, did I consider myself a Marxist-Leninist, I would say no, I did not consider myself a Marxist-Leninist. If you asked me whether I considered myself a Communist, a classic Communist, I would say no, I did not consider myself a classic Communist.”4
Asked in the Sierra by the Spanish writer Enrique Meneses his opinion about the Soviet Union, Castro replied, “I hate Soviet imperialism as much as Yankee imperialism. I’m not breaking my neck fighting one dictatorship to fall into the hands of another.” Anticipating that some might think the rebel leader was simply playing him, Meneses explained that he had been at Castro’s side for nearly six straight months by the time of this statement, too long to be fooled. When, in 1961, an Italian reporter requested that Castro characterize the Revolution, a frustrated leader responded, “you wish to write that this is a socialist revolution, right? Write it, then.” The aim of the Revolution was to banish a “tyrannical system,” along with its “philo-imperialistic bourgeois state apparatus, the bureaucracy, the police, and a mercenary army.” Targeting privilege, aristocracy, and exploitation, the revolution comprised a national liberation program that included agrarian reform—much like that recently carried out by the United States in Japan. The “Americans and priests” might call that communism, Castro quipped; he knew “very well that it is not.”5
Finally, Lucas Morán (no friend of the Revolution), who once fought with both Fidel and Raúl Castro, wrote that he never detected any attempt on the part of Castro or his fellow leaders “to indoctrinate the rebel footsoldiers politically.” In not a single case, Moran insisted, had the rebels established schools dedicated to anything more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. Nor had he ever seen the rebel commanders “examining the texts of Marx, Lenin, Engels, or other Marxist intellectuals.”6
U.S. officials’ surprise at discovering evidence of communism among Movement members reflected a consensus in the U.S. intelligence community that Castro and the Movement were neither fundamentally communist nor pro-Soviet. U.S. intelligence agencies had been tracking Castro for some time. The earliest known reference to Castro in CIA files dates to 1948, when, after his participation in the Bogotazo, he was described as someone “who manages to get himself involved in many things that do not concern him”—a reference that says more about the United States’ sense of itself as a regional arbiter than it does about Castro.7
U.S. attention to Castro heightened as his reputation grew. In May 1955, the U.S. embassy in Havana followed the polemic between Chaviano and the recently amnestied Castro in Bohemia magazine, where Castro demolished Chaviano’s version of the Moncada attack. While acknowledging Castro had the better argument, the embassy could not disguise its disdain for the young firebrand. “Ever since he emerged from jail under political amnesty,” the memo noted, “Fidel Castro has lost no opportunity to further his pretensions as a martyr to freedom and a patriot seeking to overthrow tyranny and oppression.” If this kept up, he would surely find himself in trouble again, the report suggested, before conceding that “Castro’s rebuke of Chaviano was “justified.”8 The Americans liked their colonial dependents pliant.
By the mid-1950s, Cuba had become a pawn in the Cold War. In April 1955, CIA director Allen Dulles traveled to Havana to preside over the establishment of the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities (known by the acronym BRAC). BRAC relied on information provided by Batista’s own Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM), hardly a source of dispassionate analysis. Early the next year, a U.S. embassy official dismissed a SIM report entitled “Antidemocratic Antecedents and Activities of Fidel Castro” as nothing more than a summary of previous allegations. The Batista government was determined to “make Castro a ‘Rojo,’ but the result is a rather poor one,” the official observed.9
U.S. intelligence followed Castro into exile in Mexico. In January 1956, an embassy dispatch noted that Castro had been tying himself to the tradition of José Martí. Castro had plenty of “will and enthusiasm,” the dispatch noted, but he lacked “the means for a successful revolution.” A month later, an official from the U.S. embassy in Mexico met with a reporter who had just filed a long interview with Castro for United Press. The reporter found Castro “sincere, ambitious, confident, even cocky.” He was “convinced of the justice of his cause and expected early success.”10
Castro’s return to Cuba and the ensuing violence brought the U.S. diplomatic corps to high alert by autumn 1957. In early September, naval officers at the port of Cienfuegos arose in mutiny, prompting brutal government suppression that included bombers, tanks, and ammunition provided by the United States. Responding to a query from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles about the role of U.S.-supplied weapons in suppressing the revolt, Ambassador Earl E. T. Smith, in office since the preceding June, explained that all the bombers deployed in the government attack on Cienfuegos had been supplied by the United States, though some before the Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement of March 1952, which mandated that U.S. munitions provided by the United States not be used on Cuban citizens. Meanwhile, no U.S.-supplied ammunition was used in the reprisal, though “a few” U.S.-supplied machine guns may have been involved. Smith then acknowledged that the Cuban Army had used U.S.-supplied equipment in its campaign against the rebels in recent months.11 The negative public perception of this would haunt Ambassador Smith to the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Smith, a former businessman (and head of the Florida Republican Party) with no experience in diplomacy, immediately ingratiated himself to President Batista, becoming one of his staunchest defenders.12
By late 1957, the U.S. government appeared increasingly determined to bring Castro’s insurrection to a halt. The question was not whether but how best to do so. In mid-November, CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick suggested sending a U.S. national peripherally connected to the government to mediate between the parties. Given Cubans’ wariness of outside intervention, this would have to be done discreetly, Kirkpatrick noted, without fanfare or publicity. A week later, the State Department approached Adolf Berle, an expert on Latin America bound for Havana, to see what he might do to bring the Cuban war to an “orderly conclusion,” as if both the State Department and CIA had not read the Sierra Maestra Manifesto and subsequent pronouncements on the subject of U.S. intervention—or, perhaps more likely, simply did not take Castro seriously. Berle acknowledged Cubans’ sensitivity to outside interference, before concluding that “we are responsible for keeping order in the hemisphere.”13
In January 1958, William Wieland, the director of the State Department’s Office of Middle American Affairs, proposed trading U.S. military equipment for a pledge by Batista to end the state of emergency and curtail the “excessive brutalities” and most “violent and sadistic officers of the army and police,” as if confirming the accusations of opposition groups.14 Ambassador Smith regarded Castro as virtually the sole source of instability and violence on the island. While on a visit to Washington in mid-January, Smith was asked if the United States would ever be able to do business with Castro. Smith, who had never met the man, replied, simply, no: “The United States Government can only do business with a government that will honor its international obligations and can maintain law and order.” Surely, if those were the conditions of legitimacy, then it was Batista, not Castro, whom Washington should be wary of. In the Sierra Maestra, where the rebels were in charge, law and order reigned, as any visiting journalist, local resident, or U.S. consular official could attest.15 By late January, State Department officials were becoming so uncomfortable with the Cuban government’s escalating violence that they advised Smith to ask Batista to keep word of the receipt of U.S. arms to an absolute minimum.16
The next month, the State Department identified yet another bargaining chip Smith might use in discussions over U.S. weapons deliveries: a commitment to general elections. In conversations with Wieland, Felipe Pazos, only recently a Castro confidant and a signatory of the Sierra Maestra Manifesto, expressed a willingness to negotiate with Batista and take part in a prospective election. State would do everything in its power to publish what it called “the other side of the Castro story,” drawn from the perspective of U.S. businessmen.17 Over the course of the next several weeks, Smith responded with contradictory reports expressing, on the one hand, the urgency of the U.S. not withholding military aid to the embattled dictator, and on the other hand, his belief that the insurrection was near its end. “Fidel Castro is losing prestige,” Smith reported on February 10, citing no evidence. Smith’s dispatches caused head-scratching in Washington (“there seems to be an increasing amount of violence throughout Cuba,” assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs Roy Rubottom wrote back on Valentine’s Day) and contrasted notably with more balanced reports of Daniel Braddock, an embassy staffer.18 By the end of the month, Smith was grasping for straws. “President Batista appeared convinced at meeting February 19 that Communists actively supporting Castro,” as if Batista would say anything else. In fact, Cuban communists remained leery of Castro through the triumph of the Revolution.19
In late January, Castro told Guevara that he had been approached about possible peace terms with the government. Would the rebels agree to turn over Oriente Province, with all the rebel arms, in exchange for an honorable election? If Batista won the election, the rebels would stand down. If the rebels won the election, they would take over control of government. “What do you think?” he asked Guevara. “It’s possible that an emissary will arrive on Sunday.” Of course, he would remain skeptical, Castro told his skeptical friend. Still, this would provide “a good opportunity to feel out the regime.” Meanwhile, the fight would go on. “There is no truce,” he said, “nor will there be, nor will we concede one.” He attributed the regime’s interest in discussions to concern about the morale of its soldiers.”20
In early February, the rebels entertained some distinguished guests: Senators León (Nené) Ramírez and Eduardo (Lalo) Roca, from Manzanillo. The two traveled to the Sierra apparently on their own initiative to engage Castro on the subject of a cease-fire. Journalist Enrique Meneses, from Paris Match, was with the rebels at this time and remembers seeing formal arrangements being made and suspecting that something big was in the works. For the first time since his arrival, the air was perfumed with the aroma of sweet cooking, and “the rebels were polishing their boots and cleaning their arms with more care than usual.” By this time, Castro claimed to be presiding over the Liberated Territory of Cuba, and he wanted the event to have the trappings of a state dinner. Ramírez dutifully played the part of honored guest, arriving with a Christmas present (a brand-new pistol) for Celia Sánchez, the daughter of a family friend.21
After dinner, the group got down to business. Castro repeated his terms. Batista must depart, the Constitution must be restored. The rebels would then lay down their arms. An interim government would be named, its only mandate to ensure order and hold elections within six months. The agreement would be ratified by the current government handing over control of Oriente Province, including its armed forces, to the rebels. Representatives of the July 26 Movement would not serve in the provisional government, their only function to oversee an honest election. Only later, with constitutionalism restored, would the July 26 Movement establish a new political party and promote its program of revolutionary reforms. Castro assured his guests that he and his Movement were unassociated with Carlos Prío and his followers, on the one hand, and with communists, on the other (the communists stood “for an imperialism worse than the Yankees’,” he said, “and just as foreign to our customs and beliefs”). How then, it is fair to ask, could he account for the presence of people like Guevara in his midst? “Anyone who wants to help us is welcome to do so,” he said, only “without strings.”
Meneses reported that the meeting went smoothly until Ramírez asked Castro if he meant that there would be a “period of transition without Batista, with a military junta” during the transition. “We shall never accept that!” Castro interjected. Cubans were tired of “tin-pot generals.” Ramírez returned to Havana and a warm reception from the press. Batista officials greeted him coldly. His fellow senator Rolando Masferrer challenged him to a duel, presumably for taking Castro seriously.
The flow of journalists to the Sierra continued. That same week, Look magazine published an interview by Andrew St. George, in which Castro provided an update on the state of the Revolution. Rebel territory had expanded, he said. The Cuban Army had virtually abandoned the Sierra and was now ringing it with a blockade designed to starve out the rebels. Government planes were strafing peasant communities. Unable to hurt the guerrillas, soldiers showed up in towns, shooting suspected sympathizers. In a recent case, Castro alleged, forty-seven “simple farmers” were “rounded up and shot . . . their deaths announced as those of ‘rebels’ killed in combat.”22
St. George asked Castro why the rebels were burning sugarcane when “the island’s economic life depended on it?” For exactly that reason, Castro explained: to deprive Batista of the income by which he purchased his weapons of war. The Castro family farm in Birán would not be spared. Burning the cane fields was “a hard step. But it is a legitimate act of war.” Cuban freedom fighters had done the same thing in the wars of independence. The Americans, too, for that matter, he reminded St. George—when they emptied the king’s tea into Boston Harbor.
Was Castro merely telling a U.S. audience (and government) what he thought it wanted to hear? Perhaps. Castro made this overture from a position of strength. The rebel army had not only proved its staying power, it had expanded its territory. That February, Castro promoted his brother Raúl and Juan Almeida to the title of commander, assigning them companies of their own and readying them for new battle fronts in the Sierra Cristal and the Santiago region, respectively. The same month, Castro published a set of criminal and civil codes for the Liberated Territory written by the Movement’s newly appointed judge advocate general, Humberto Sorí Marín, a respected lawyer. Castro established a system of civil administration that included graduated taxation. The rebels were building hospitals and schools. For the first time since March 1952, a rebel victory seemed not only possible, but likely, and Castro did not want anything to get in its way.23
Success made Castro ecumenical. In mid-February, he reached out to enemy commanders, imploring them to avoid violence and switch sides. The first to hear from him was a captain by the last name of Guerra who commanded the garrison at Pino del Agua, at the foothills of the Sierra, where Guevara’s troops were engaged. We have you surrounded, said Castro to his “compatriot.” No one was coming to his rescue as the rebels had cut off access routes. The commander and his men were defending an unjust cause, Castro declared. His soldiers were poised to die defending the interests of people far away who cared nothing for them and shared no interests in common. The rebels were more than ready to take the garrison by force. But they had nothing against the rank and file and would much prefer to negotiate the garrison’s surrender. Castro promised to respect the lives of the soldiers, which was “always our custom.” He even promised to put the men at liberty within twenty-four hours; those who feared retaliation from their superiors were welcome to join the rebel ranks.24 Guerra ignored Castro’s overture at some cost. In two, ultimately indecisive days of fighting, Guerra lost some twenty killed and a similar number wounded, while surrendering thirty-three rifles, five machine guns, and considerable ammunition. The rebels suffered losses of their own, with three deaths and as many wounded. But they once again proved that they could hold their own, and the enemy noticed, sending reinforcements to ensure that the isolated garrison was not entirely overrun.25
A few weeks later, Castro made an emotional appeal to Ceferino Rodríguez, another army commander and a former childhood friend from Oriente. Actually, Rodríguez had been the first to make contact, sending Castro a note acknowledging their common past and seeking a way out of an impending showdown. This was an “extraordinary moment,” Castro wrote back, a rare time when individuals stood face-to-face with destiny, and in which only the rare ones distinguished themselves. He urged Rodríguez to step up to the moment and join the side that was fighting not for narrow self-interest but for the glory of Cuba as a whole. Were he to do so, Castro assured his friend, Rodríguez would not have to confront his fellow members of the military. It was the example, not Rodríguez’s fighting, that would tell. Government troops were demoralized, tired of fighting for an ignoble cause.26
By engaging enemy officers in this way, Castro was not simply trying to avoid bloodshed, though that was reason enough. Rather, he was looking for a bridge to an alliance with the army rank and file capable of defending a triumphant Revolution. This was a lesson hard learned by supporters of the Revolution of 1933. When the push for much needed social reforms collided with U.S. and Cuban business interests backed by Batista, the revolutionary government had nowhere to turn—no political apparatus to rally the people, no army to defend the Revolution. Castro would not repeat this mistake.
In a young army lieutenant named Aquiles Chinea, Castro believed he found a solution. Conditions are “extraordinarily favorable,” he wrote Chinea in the middle of March. All that was lacking was for an influential figure to emerge from the army to declare that enough was enough. By rejecting the idea of a military junta taking over after Batista’s removal, Castro did not suggest that the military had no role to play in the ensuing Revolution. Given the interests already amassed against the Revolution, an “insurgent military” able to march “shoulder to shoulder with the people” was indispensable to its success. By allying with a younger officer like Chinea, Castro intended to sidestep officers implicated in machinations like the Miami Pact. And for the record, he told Chinea, a revolutionary government would not needlessly antagonize the U.S. embassy; there was no need to worry about that. The North Americans would retain the rebels’ respect so long as they kept their noses out of Cuba’s internal affairs.27
Castro regularly set aside time to correspond with those he seemed to regard as future constituents. In early March, for example, he reached out to the mother of one of his prisoners, as if remembering his own mother’s grief when he and Raúl were jailed after Moncada.28 Another note addressed a widow whose husband had died in combat. She was now sewing uniforms for Castro and his men, and he wanted her to know that her sacrifice and continued work did not go unnoticed.29 Castro’s letter writing extended to the children of his commanders, as if thinking of his own son, Fidelito. He told Faustino Pérez’s son, José Ramón, that his father would “soon be able to spend his nights at home and you will see him every day. He will spend Sunday with you and play with you and your friends.” There were brighter days ahead, Castro promised. The boy’s father had many fascinating stories to tell that the son could pass along to his classmates. Oh, and Castro had a present for the boy, the exact nature of which he would not divulge, but promised to deliver soon. “Take care of your mama,” he signed off, “and behave yourself!”30
While Castro bided his time in the Sierra Maestra, the Batista government’s indiscriminate crackdown on the opposition mobilized professionals, businessmen, and clergy throughout the island. Just the previous autumn, the National Medical Association asked the Supreme Court to do something to put an end to the government’s torture and murder of physicians for simply fulfilling their duty to save lives.31 In late February, the Cuban Episcopate added its voice, urging Batista to sit down with Castro. Just as negotiations looked set to proceed, Castro pulled out, saying that “no decent Cuban can sit down at the table presided over by Fulgencio Batista.”32
Next to step up was a group of judges, who asked the Havana Court of Appeals, one of the country’s preeminent legal authorities, to call a halt to Batista’s atrocities. The rule of law and administration of justice hung by a nail, the judges wrote, citing a litany of atrocities carried out on judges themselves by government agents. Judges’ own families were threatened, their homes subjected to bombs and gunfire, developments unprecedented in Cuba’s tumultuous history. Rather than operating as instruments of the law, the police were terrorizing the nation. Cuba’s Supreme Court colluded in the abuse, ordering prisoners turned over to the police, who later assassinated them. Elsewhere, government officials charged with cracking down on prostitution and gambling conveniently looked the other way in exchange for a cut of the profits. The judges went on, describing similar conditions throughout the country, with death by “gunshot, torture, and hanging” an everyday event. In a nation where judges themselves made a mockery of habeas corpus and the rule of law, there could be no public order, no administration of justice, no constitutionalism and civil liberty. What, the judges demanded, did Cuba’s highest magistrates propose to do about it?33
The next week brought a still vaster collection of professional and recreational societies to the fore, when a group calling itself the Civic Institutions issued a clarion call for Batista’s overthrow via a general strike (it claimed to lack the means to overthrow the government by force). Coming from a sector of society that had long clung to the belief that dialogue with Batista was still possible, the group’s intervention was significant. For six years since the coup, they explained, idealistic young Cubans had spilled their blood to awaken the conscience of the nation. For six years, their “heroism and sacrifice” was met with nothing but brute force. “The moment has arrived,” the Civic Institutions said. The government must go, if not by violence, then by general strike—a right “of free men granted by the Constitution.”34
The idea of a general strike was also on the minds of Faustino Pérez and fellow members of the July 26 Movement leadership, which broached the idea with Castro at a meeting in the Sierra. This seemed like a good time for a strike, the visitors said. The Cuban public appeared to be openly turning against the dictatorship. Weapons were arriving in the Sierra courtesy of Costa Rican president José Figueres, among others. Two new fronts had been established in the Sierra Cristal and on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba. The Movement had published a new legal code and proposed a new provisional president. The Sierra Maestra was all but “clean” of enemy troops. Militias trained by the Movement were in position to conduct sabotage on public utilities, highways, and police throughout the country, including in the capital. Laborers organized by the Cuban Confederation of Workers were poised to conduct a walkout and only awaited notice. The Civic Resistance was on board. The Revolutionary Directory too. What did Castro have to say?
The call to strike surprised him. There had not been a successful general strike in Cuba for over twenty years, he noted. Reports of the Movement’s organization in Havana and other cities were far from glowing. Preparations for a general strike threatened to rob the Sierra of desperately needed resources (men, weapons, ammunition), while relegating it to a secondary status behind the urban militias. This time Pérez prevailed. On March 12, against his better judgment, Castro signed off on what became known as the Total War Manifesto, calling for a general strike backed by intensified military operations throughout Oriente and Las Villas provinces.35 Castro was not the only doubter. The latest manifesto received a cool reception from two stakeholders crucial to the strike’s success, the Cuban Confederation of Workers and the Communist Party, sidelined by Pérez. Moreover, contrary to what Pérez and the others had told Castro, the Revolutionary Directorate declined to partake in the sabotage activity, insisting that the time was not yet ripe.36
Pérez intended to launch the strike on March 31, amid widespread frustration over yet another suspension of constitutional guarantees. By the time he finally got around to it ten days later, the public agitation had dissipated. The announcement of the strike was delayed until 11 a.m., when most workers were already at work. As a result, few if any workers walked off the job, leaving the strike in the hands of enthusiastic but inadequately armed urban militias who were no match for Batista’s army and police. In Havana, where Pérez’s organizational prowess was on the line, the strike fizzled out within a matter of hours, but not before scores of young bodies piled up in the city morgue. The government gleefully publicized the Movement’s ineptitude, while pointing to its brutal suppression of the militias as evidence of its enduring strength.37
Bad for the Movement as a whole, the failed strike was cataclysmic for the Llano, which never recovered. The strike was a big moral defeat, Castro told Celia Sánchez, leaving him no choice but “to assume responsibility for the stupidity of the rest.” Under the pretext of combating his alleged caudillismo (or heavy-handedness), “everybody was doing whatever they wanted.” No more. In early May, amid fierce recrimination and finger-pointing, a war council of Movement leaders convened in the Sierra and named Castro commander in chief of the revolutionary forces and secretary general of the National Directory. This new role made him responsible not only for carrying out the guerrillas’ war, as before, but for the provisioning and distribution of weapons and ammunition down to the last bullet.
For the first time since returning to Cuba in December 1956 Castro had undisputed control of the Movement.38