For me there is only one date: July 26, and two eras: before the Moncada and after the Moncada.
—HAYDÉE SANTAMARÍA
FROM A DISTANCE, it might have looked like they were headed for a weekend auto show. In the velvet darkness before dawn on July 26, 1953, a convoy of sixteen classic American sedans lumbered along an unpaved highway in the tropical countryside near Santiago, the headlights of bubblegum-colored Buicks, Chevrolets, and Dodges lighting up clouds of dust and flashing tailfins ahead of them. On either side, the walls of sugarcane created virtual tunnels as they lumbered ahead.
Eight men were crammed into each car, all of them dressed in light brown military uniforms, all with sergeants’ stripes. Most of the outfits were makeshift, sewn from cheap fabric. A few men cradled decent weapons—Belgian shotguns or Luger pistols from army surplus stores, a submachine gun dating from the Spanish Civil War—but the majority were carrying cheap, low-caliber sport rifles. Many were wearing civilian street shoes, including two-tone spats.
Even before sunrise, the summer air was oppressively humid inside the vehicles, and nobody spoke. Almost none of the 160 or so men and two women had slept the night before. Fidel, who was driving the second car (and wearing a uniform several sizes too small for his frame, giving him a slightly comical appearance), had not rested for nearly four days. A few tensely puffed on cigarettes or hummed the national anthem to themselves. Having only learned their target a few hours earlier, most believed they would not survive the morning.
The troop’s plan of attack was reckless. They intended to storm a string of military sites, chief among them a thousand-man barracks in the heart of Santiago called the Moncada. It was the last night of Carnival and the soldiers, ideally, would be taken by surprise in their underwear as they slept off hangovers in their bunks. Even though they were outnumbered roughly ten to one, the rebels intended to take the whole lot prisoner, seize their weapons, and use the radio to issue a call to arms interspersed with bursts of rousing music including Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. This audacious act would shake Cubans from their lethargy, provoking them to rise up en masse against Batista and demand the restoration of democracy.
What could possibly go wrong?
Three and a half years before the Granma landing, Fidel’s first stab at an armed uprising has elements of both Shakespearean tragedy and a Three Stooges skit. It was born from the mix of desperation and naïveté that suffused politics after the 1952 coup, when Cubans realized that all peaceful options for protest had been closed to them. Had things gone differently, El Moncada (as the attack is simply referred to in Cuba) might have caused barely a ripple in world history, of no more interest today than a skirmish between two forgotten medieval principalities. But, thanks to some extraordinary strokes of fate, it became the foundation stone for the entire revolution, joining the roll call of military fiascos that are celebrated by the losers—Cuba’s answer to the Alamo, Gallipoli, Dunkirk, and the Battle of Little Bighorn. The date of July 26 is engraved on every Cuban’s mental calendar. Without it, nothing that followed could have occurred.
A VIOLENT CONFRONTATION like the Moncada was all but inevitable from the moment Batista had seized power fifteen months earlier. At first the putsch had gone off quietly. After midnight on the night of March 9, 1952, wearing a brown leather jacket and packing a pistol, Batista had driven into the Camp Columbia barracks in Havana, “the Pentagon of Cuba,” and mobilized the troops. Power was transferred almost without bloodshed. At 1:00 p.m. the next day, Radio Havana simply announced that a new government was ruling Cuba, and few shed any tears as the disgraced President Prío was bundled onto a plane to Miami. The upcoming elections were canceled and Washington rushed to recognize the new military regime. At a black-tie dinner soon after, the US ambassador offered to sell Batista state-of-the-art weapons at discount rates and even train counterinsurgency forces.
The coup ended any illusion that Cuba was heading for democratic reform. Batista might have had some redeeming qualities during his first rule, but in his fifties he had become cynical and smug. “The people and I are the dictators,” he boasted. Although the economy was one of the healthiest in Latin America, his second presidency was soon marked by a contempt for law that shocked even the most jaded observers. Batista openly offered sweetheart casino deals to celebrity American mobsters such as Meyer Lansky, Albert Anastasia, and Lucky Luciano—they deposited suitcases full of cash at his office every Monday—while the savagery of his enforcers escalated. The military intelligence service, SIM, was given free rein to kidnap opponents of the regime, whose mangled bodies would be found in the city morgue or strung half-naked from telegraph poles.
As his death squads roamed the night, Batista would retreat to his estate on the rural outskirts of Havana, behind walls garlanded with barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. He entertained ambassadors in a sumptuous library filled with the marble busts of his heroes, including Benjamin Franklin, Gandhi, and Joan of Arc, and unwound by playing endless rounds of canasta with acquaintances or watching horror movies in his screening room. (He was particularly fond of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and anything starring Boris Karloff.)
Within a year of the coup, frustration had begun to bubble up all over Cuba, although opposition to Batista was divided, to say the least. A budding agitator could choose from a smorgasbord of clandestine groups whose welter of acronyms have a certain Monty Python ring: there was the DEU (University Student Directorate), the DR (Revolutionary Directorate), the FCR (Civic Revolutionary Front), the MNR (National Revolutionary Movement), the FON (National Workers Front), and the FONU (United National Workers Front). One might join the AAA (Friends of Aureliano Arango, a leftist college professor) and, for those who could not make up their minds, the ABC—which, charmingly, stood for nothing. With his hopes as a political candidate dashed, Fidel had gone back to work as a lawyer for the poor while fostering his underground contacts. He offered his legal services in exchange for food—much to the exasperation of Mirta, who was now raising Fidelito almost alone in a shabby apartment, trying to make ends meet with an allowance provided by Fidel’s father. The city regularly cut off their gas and electricity. On one occasion Fidel returned home to find that debt collectors had repossessed all their furniture, leaving Mirta on the floor with the baby. Only once did it seem that Fidel might have a limit for this bare-bones life, when he left a nighttime meeting to find that his treasured Chevrolet had been repossessed, a fate no less dismal in 1950s Havana than in modern Los Angeles. He went to his favorite café, but the owner wouldn’t give him more coffee or cigars on credit. A newsstand owner shooed him away because he was trying to read a magazine without buying it. Fidel had no choice but to walk the three miles to his apartment, where he sank into bed with tears of black despair. It’s possible he considered tossing in the whole revolutionary enterprise and joining a decent law firm, perhaps even becoming a family man and one day living off his inheritance. But when he awoke, the gloom had vanished and he threw himself back into his two careers, as the public lawyer and furtive agitator.
Mirta watched her husband’s behavior with confusion. Fidel felt obliged to keep her in the dark about the true nature of his activities, since her brother had joined Batista’s government as a minor minister. In fact, unbeknownst to his wife, Fidel had decided that armed insurrection was the only option left to save Cuba and almost as quickly chose the Moncada barracks in Santiago as the best target. He began to gather a circle of supporters, although like Fidel himself they hardly fit the stereotype of down-trodden revolutionaries. Fidel’s partner, Abel Santamaría, was a dapper twenty-four-year-old Walter Mitty type whose day job was as an accountant at the local Pontiac car dealership. He had met Fidel at a secret meeting in the Havana necropolis and the two had seen eye to eye immediately. Photos show Abel as a grinning, skinny figure in thick sunglasses and a white short-sleeved shirt, looking like Buddy Holly on vacation. He was a voracious reader and known amongst his friends for his sunny disposition; he exuded an air that nothing bad could ever happen to him.
Abel slept on the couch in the one-bedroom apartment belonging to his older sister Haydée, who became Fidel’s next key recruit. “Yeyé,” as she was nicknamed, had been forced to drop out of elementary school but educated herself to become a nurse and teacher. Her shy manner and dowdy appearance hid a crackling intelligence. As an urban operative, she soon discovered a talent for disguise, making herself look like a different person entirely just by changing her hairstyle. But Haydée also suffered from depression, which could be so severe that she would spend days in bed. To cheer herself up, she filled her modest apartment, a sixth-floor walk-up, with dozens of daisies.
Melba Hernández was the final member of the “general staff” of the group Fidel simply called “the Movement,” a name that evoked a religious cult. One of Cuba’s first women lawyers, the thirty-one-year-old Hernández was mesmerized by Fidel the moment they met. “When I gave my hand to this young man, I felt very secure,” she later recalled. “I felt I had found the way. When this young man began to talk, all I could do was to listen to him.” Many others would report falling under Fidel’s spell in exactly the same way.
IN RETROSPECT, THERE is a poignant disconnect between the youthful high spirits of the Moncada’s planning stage and the violence of its aftermath. Memories of this early phase—revolution on a shoestring—would be suffused by a golden hue of innocence, with a lighthearted atmosphere closer to a Friends episode than the grim cells of Dostoyevsky novels. “We all fitted in together, we all ate together, we all lived together and we were all happy together,” Yeyé recalled of her daisy-filled apartment. “Never did we share anything the way we shared that little place. Never did we taste meals that were tastier than those we cooked then.” The only office equipment needed for the Moncada plot was Fidel’s Art Deco desk, a mimeographing machine to print their newsletter the Accuser, and an ashtray in every corner. Nights were spent feverishly discussing strategy in the bare, neon-lit teahouses of Havana’s Chinatown, sharing plates of oily Cuban-Chinese noodles. Supporters often ended up sleeping on Haydée’s floor, which (she insisted) “was the springiest, most comfortable mattress in the world.”
The final budget for the Moncada attack was a paltry 40,000 pesos (which at the time was pegged one to one with the US dollar), half of it donated by Movement members themselves. New recruits were asked to cut back on cigarettes and coffee to buy bullets, which Fidel would then count out and record one by one. The subversive protocol was just as threadbare, as if cobbled together from stories of the French Resistance or the Hollywood film noirs that were all the rage. Haydée and Melba smuggled rifles in florist’s boxes, pistols in their handbags, secret messages in their beehive hairdos. Military training (such as it was) was provided by Pedro Miret, an engineering student who had some experience with ballistics. It’s a sign of how liberated Havana college life was that they often did their shooting practice on the university grounds, using weapons that were as casually available as soft drugs on a campus in California today.
By spring, some three hundred men and women had drifted into the Movement. Most of them were in their early twenties and drawn from a broad cross section of Cuban society, including laborers, factory workers, students, and professionals. There was a poet, a cook, a dentist, a doctor, a male nurse, and an oyster vendor. The Movement even boasted members of Havana aristocracy. Fidel’s man-of-action aura had drawn the attention of a glamorous socialite, twenty-six-year-old Natalia Revuelta. Educated in France and the US, exquisitely groomed and poised, “Naty” was married to one of Cuba’s top heart surgeons but had become bored by the high-society circuit of card games and cocktail parties. She was also a stunning beauty with large jade-colored eyes and gleaming blond hair—the Grace Kelly of the revolution. She first met Fidel at an anti-Batista rally and immediately offered her sumptuous apartment for meetings when her husband was out of town. Naty soon became one of the Movement’s crucial supporters. She pawned her jewelry and donated her 6,000-peso savings to the cause. She helped Haydée and Melba sew uniforms. She chose the music that would be played after the victory (including Eroica and Chopin’s Polonaise in A major). Naty was also trusted with the genuinely risky task of delivering the so-called “Moncada Manifesto” to politicians and journalists in Havana on the morning of the attack. Written by Fidel and a delicate young poet named Raúl Gómez, it explained that Batista should be expelled for “the crimes of blood, dishonor, unlimited greed, and looting of the national treasury.”
Although Fidel was later accused of already harboring communist sympathies, at this early stage there was no sign of it. He and his supporters joined together under the banner of José Martí, with broad calls for social justice and democratic elections. Like any respectable student, Fidel had read his Marx and even carried a dog-eared copy of Lenin’s writings with him during the Moncada attack, but his political language was purely nationalist. Only two members of the Movement were card-carrying Communists, one of them his younger brother Raúl, who had turned bolshie during his college days. Meanwhile, the Party itself showed no interest at all in Fidel’s eccentric little splinter group. (In fact, Cuban politics rivaled that of postwar Italy in its unlikely alliances, with the Communists at one stage joining forces with Batista.) One student friend, Alfredo Guevara, later reported that he tried to convert Fidel to communism in the early 1950s, but Fidel had joked: “I’d be a Communist if I were Stalin!” He wanted power above all else; ideology came a distant second.
In fact, nobody in the Movement was plotting a socialist utopia. In 1953, Cuba without Batista was dream enough.
AS SUMMER APPROACHED, Haydée and Melba relocated to the Oriente, renting a quaint, well-hidden farmhouse seven miles outside of Santiago as a base of operations. Called Granjita Siboney, it would have made a pleasant writer’s retreat in happier times. Instead, the two women spent their days preparing for the arrival of los chicos, “the guys,” as they fondly called their underground army—adding the finishing touches to one hundred and sixty uniforms on a hand-operated Singer machine, sleeping in an airy room painted white with red trim, and hiding rifles in wells in the garden. As the July 26 deadline neared, they were joined by Haydée’s brother Abel and the girls’ activist fiancés—Haydée’s love, Boris Luis Santa Coloma, and Melba’s Jesús Montané, a gourmand who cooked up delicious meals like chicken with tomatoes and peppers. For several weeks, the men scoped out the Moncada, whose oppressive yellow walls rose above a parade ground in Santiago, and timed its patrols.
Haydée continued to surprise her fellow conspirators with her inner calm and was often given the most dangerous smuggling missions. On one train trip from Havana, she had such difficulty lugging a valise full of guns on board that a young soldier felt obliged to help her. (She told him it was full of college books; he spent the entire overnight trip by her side.) And yet, with her tendency to melancholy, Haydée also had dark intimations about the future. When her brother went to Santiago with some friends to attend Carnival one night, she was happy for them, but caught herself thinking: Perhaps it will be the last Carnival they will ever see.
TWO DAYS BEFORE the planned attack, 160-odd handpicked Movement members in Havana were given instructions to leave for the Oriente by car, bus, or train. Obeying “clandestine protocol,” only the six leaders knew the real reason for their trip; the others were simply told to bring a comfortable change of clothes.
The twenty-six-year-old Afro-Cuban bricklayer Juan Almeida—one of the early recruits who would stay with Fidel for years—was at work on a contruction site when a friend arrived and told him they had to go east for “target practice.” It was the farthest from Havana he had ventured in his life, but he jumped without question into a waiting car. Even during the grueling two-day drive across 540 miles of sunbaked sugar country, Almeida was kept in the dark. (“I thought we were going to Santiago for Carnival as a reward for my doing well in training exercises,” he later joked.) Only when they arrived at Siboney farmhouse, where the girls were handing out uniforms and weapons, did he realize what was happening. Almeida eagerly lined up for his rifle but was bitterly disappointed to be given a .22-caliber—more suitable for shooting pigeons, he felt, than any military target.
Raúl was woken up in Havana with a blinding hangover after a wild party and told to get himself to the train station. The easygoing twenty-two-year-old, who still looked like a teenager, had only recently returned from an extended tour of Europe, where he had visited socialist youth conferences with the festive spirit of a modern backpacker at Oktoberfest. He had promptly been arrested for carrying anti-Batista propaganda, and Melba had only barely managed to spring him from jail in time for the attack. Although he would later become Fidel’s “relief pitcher,” Raúl was not trusted with the target at this stage. Even so, when he groggily boarded the train and a friend gave him his ticket to Santiago, he shrewdly guessed: “El Moncada?”
Fidel himself was the last to leave Havana. He shaved off his mustache, gave his wife and son a good-bye kiss (but didn’t tell Mirta about the plan), donned a white guayabera, and went to a hire car office with his driver. He told the clerk that he was going on a beach holiday and roared off in a blue Buick. By the time he arrived at the farmhouse, Fidel hadn’t slept for three days and was running on adrenaline. Still, there were signs the pressure was wearing on him: he had to stop halfway in the city of Santa Clara to buy a new pair of spectacles, since he had somehow forgotten his in Havana. (Today, the optometrist’s store bears a proud plaque.)
Fidel arrived at the farmhouse on the night of Saturday, July 25, and outlined to the 165 recruits his plan to attack the Moncada barracks. He himself would lead the main assault with 123 men. There would be two supporting strikes in Santiago, and a third, with twenty-seven men, on a garrison in the provincial town of Bayamo, ninety miles away. It was a daunting prospect. Few of the men had even been to the Oriente before; now they were going straight into battle against one of the largest military bases in all of Cuba.
Haydée recalls that the evening passed in a sort of romantic delirium. It was “the most joyful of nights,” she later said. “We went out to the patio, and the moon was bigger and more brilliant; the stars were bigger and brighter; the palms taller and greener . . . Everything was more beautiful, larger, lovelier, finer; we felt ourselves to be better, kinder.” Not all the invitees were so enraptured. Four college students who had previously bragged of their bravery decided Fidel’s plan was absurd and refused to take part. They were locked in the bathroom, along with a radio expert who got cold feet. The others waited out the night, savoring a sense of destiny. Come what may, everyone knew that Cuba would never be the same again.
AS THE MOTORCADE navigated Santiago before dawn on Sunday the 26th, signs of Carnival’s debauched final night were evident. A few die-hard revelers still stumbled along the sidewalks; some were passed out in doorways or embracing in alleys. The humid air was heavy with the scents of sweat and rum, and drifting from distant windows came the last strains of salsa.
Events at the Moncada would become so confused that almost every participant had a different memory; even Fidel would contradict himself. But there is no doubt that his intricate battle plan went awry from the start. One car got a flat tire as soon as it left the farmhouse. Many of the habanero drivers became confused in Santiago’s maze of dark streets. Several took wrong turns and arrived at their destinations late.
Still, there was a brief moment of hope at 5:20 a.m., when the first car of the convoy ground to a halt at the Moncada’s gates and the driver shouted to the sentries as planned, “Clear the way, the general is coming!” The passengers then showed the guards their sergeant stripes and relieved them of their weapons. But the second car, driven by Fidel, unexpectedly ran into two patrolmen carrying submachine guns. Later, Fidel realized that he should have ignored them; the pair might have just gaped uncertainly as the motorcade passed. Instead, he stepped on the gas and rammed the car against a curb to cut them off. When Fidel produced his pistol, the other rebels in the vehicle panicked and started to fire wildly.
The shriek of an alarm bell tore through the Moncada. The element of surprise was lost, and within seconds soldiers were everywhere. The street became a firestorm. A machine gun on an observation tower raked the shiny flanks of the American cars, shattering windshields and perforating radiators. Five men from the first vehicle actually made it inside the barracks, but quickly retreated. They ran into the bizarre sight of Fidel yelling, “¡Adelante, muchachos!” at the gate, while everyone else was shouting at him, “Fidel! Get out of there! Get out!” The attack was a debacle. The soldiers spread the word to shoot at anyone wearing civilian shoes. Fidel managed to escape the scene unharmed by diving into the last working car as it roared off. Others, including Raúl, fled on foot into the back alleys.
Abel Santamaría and the twenty-odd rebels under his command were not so lucky. They had seized a nearby hospital to tend the rebel wounded; Haydée and Melba had come along to assist as nurses. Now, unaware that Fidel’s attack had failed, they kept shooting from windows as the army encircled them. Some sympathetic nurses disguised the men in hospital gowns and tucked them into spare beds. A bandage was wrapped around Abel’s head and one eye to make it look like he was an ophthalmology patient. Then they waited.
Unfortunately, as soon as the soldiers burst in, a pro-Batista patient betrayed the disguised rebels. Abel was dragged to the floor, his head beaten mercilessly with rifle butts. The twenty-one men and both women were then marched to the Moncada, where the doctor, a timid bespectacled man named Mario Muñoz, was thrashed to a pulp in the courtyard then shot in the back. Around 3:00 in the afternoon, word arrived from Havana that the soldiers were free to deal with the other captives as they wished. Haydée and Melba sat in a cell listening to the screams. Melba could recognize one viciously beaten man only when they saw his handwriting on a note he tried to pass them for his mother. It was the delicate poet Raúl Gómez, who had joined the mission as a noncombatant so he could read his Moncada Manifesto over the radio. He was then taken out and shot.
The horrors piled up. When the girls overheard a guard laughing grimly about torturing a rebel wearing black-and-white spats, Haydée realized it was her fiancé Boris. The next parts of her story have become part of Cuban revolutionary lore. First, the story goes, Yeyé was presented with the gouged-out eye of her brother Abel, and told that they would cut out the other if she didn’t reveal the rebels’ hideout. Then she was shown Boris’s severed testicle, with the promise that the other would soon also be removed. According to legend, she stoutly replied: “If you did that to them and they didn’t talk, much less will I.” The reality appears to have been marginally less grotesque. The forensic report, conducted later by civilian doctors, is today sealed in the archives of the Office of Historical Affairs in Havana; Cuban historians who have seen it privately confirm that the medics found that Abel and Boris had been savagely beaten before their murders but not maimed. It appears that the army torturers threatened to show Haydée her brother’s eye and fiancé’s testicle to intimidate her. Later, the story so perfectly captured the barbarity of Batista’s soldiers that it was passed on as fact.
The hellish scene at the barracks that night hardly needed embellishment. “Abel was dead, Boris was dead, and I did not even cry,” Haydée recalled years later. “I was feeling nothing.” She was permanently scarred. “There are those moments during which nothing can shock you,” she wrote. “Neither the bursts of machine gun fire, nor the smoke, nor the smell of burned, bloodied and dirty flesh, nor the smell of warm blood, nor the smell of cold blood, nor blood on one’s hands . . . nor the silence in the eyes of the dead. Nor their semi-parted lips, which seem about to speak a word that would freeze your soul.”
ONLY EIGHT REBELS were killed outright in the shoot-out at the Moncada, but of the thirty or so who surrendered there, only five survived. The rest were executed and their corpses scattered around the barracks in a halfhearted attempt to make it look as if they had died in battle. Three of the five survivors owed their lives to a heroic army doctor who protected them, at one point waving a pistol to keep soldiers at bay. Ninety miles away, the diversionary attack in Bayamo had also been a disaster. All but one of the twenty-seven men were put to death; three of them were dragged behind jeeps for several miles before being shot.
The first confused news of the assault electrified Cubans. Demonstrators took to the streets of Santiago demanding information about the captives; when police began arresting protesters, butchers ran out of the market with cleavers and forced them to be released. Luis Cambara, a seventeen-year-old activist in the provincial town of Maffo, recalls the first report being brought by a taxi driver at noon. Within an hour the whole population was in the plaza. “The idea that someone would attack an army barracks, such an established place!” he marveled years later. “It was incredible.” In the following days, excitement turned to outrage as reports of atrocities at the Moncada leaked out, along with grisly photographs. When the army began tracking rebels who had escaped into the countryside and finishing them off, civic and Church leaders tried to intervene. The silver-haired archbishop of Santiago, Enrique Pérez Serantes, who was a friend of the Castro family, drove himself around the rural back roads in a jeep, calling out with a megaphone for any men in hiding to surrender. (The feisty cleric was quite a sight in his full medieval regalia of black cassock and white cross, but surprisingly effective. At one stage he spotted five rebels who had been cornered by the Rural Guard in tall grass. Like a character in an Italian screwball comedy, he lifted up his cassock and vaulted a barbed wire fence to throw himself in front of the captives. The soldiers at first wanted to dispatch Pérez then and there, one merrily chanting: “I’m gonna kill me a priest! I’m gonna kill me a priest!” But they all returned to Santiago safely.)
Fidel himself was discovered by the army—alive—at dawn on August 1, sleeping in a campesino’s hut with thirteen companions. Rural Guards awoke the haggard group, who had been wandering for five nights, by raking the walls with machine-gun fire. In the first of countless lucky breaks in Fidel’s career, the detachment was led by a chivalrous older officer, Lieutenant Pedro Manuel Sarría, who managed to control his trigger-happy men. Still, it was a tense moment. When one soldier spat that Fidel was “nothing more than an assassin,” he replied theatrically: “It is you who are assassins. It is you who kill unarmed prisoners.”
“Lieutenent, let’s kill them,” muttered a corporal.
“No!” Sarría ordered, then quoted the Argentine intellectual Domingo Sarmiento: “You cannot kill ideas.”
Handcuffed in the back of an army truck, Fidel asked Sarría sotto voce why he hadn’t just shot him; his execution would surely merit a healthy promotion. Sarría, a fifty-three-year-old Afro-Cuban, replied simply: “I am not that sort of man, muchacho.”
In Santiago prison, Fidel was greeted with cheers by his surviving followers, including Raúl, who had been arrested trying to hike to the Castro family home in Birán. He celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday a few days later with hopes that the Moncada disaster might be turned into a triumph. The army’s behavior had sickened most Cubans and turned public opinion against Batista—particularly among the middle classes and professionals, who began to see Fidel and the “Moncadistas” (as they were now known) as heroes.
Fidel was placed in solitary confinement for seventy-five days, a time he used to prepare a legal defense. It was Cuba’s trial of the century: 122 handcuffed prisoners (fifty-one of them Moncada veterans, the rest Movement supporters), were led into the packed courtroom by rifle-toting soldiers, followed by twenty-two lawyers and a legion of expert witnesses. The proceedings were filled with coups de théâtre, starting from the very first minute, when Fidel brazenly held up his handcuffed hands: “You cannot judge people who are manacled!” (They were removed). But the result was a foregone conclusion. The judges doled out thirteen-year sentences to most of the rebels. Melba and Haydée received seven months in a women’s prison.
Fidel himself was tried separately and in secret. The judges gathered in a tiny nurse’s office in the bullet-scarred hospital that Abel had captured on July 26, whose only decor was a human skeleton hanging in a glass display case and a portrait of Florence Nightingale. The prosecutor spoke for only two minutes. Fidel, dressed in a blue winter suit, spoke for two hours straight. His epic speech would become the sacred text of the Cuban Revolution. Looming above a desk with a few notes, Fidel held forth on Cuban history, politics, and international law. He condemned the army’s brutality in baroque terms—“Moncada barracks was turned into a workshop of torture and death. Some shameful individuals turned their uniforms into butcher’s aprons. The walls were splattered with blood . . .”—and quoted Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Balzac to argue that Cubans had a duty to resist the tyrant Batista. Throwing in references to republican Rome and ancient China, he then worked methodically through the English, French, and American Revolutions, with the Declaration of Independence receiving special mention for its “beautiful” introduction.
It was a rhetorical tour de force now known to all Cubans by its resounding last line, “La historia me absolverá.” “Condemn me,” Fidel thundered. “It does not matter. History will absolve me.” A stunned silence fell over the temporary courtroom when Fidel stopped speaking, but once again the decision was in no doubt. After only a minute’s consultation, the judges sentenced him to fifteen years.
Fidel emerged to the applause of supporters gathered in the street. The rules of Cuban politics had shifted irrevocably. He had become the public face of opposition to Batista, transformed from an erratic ruffian into an admired, idealistic figure. The Moncada attack had also made news around the world. It was Fidel’s splashy debut on the front page of the New York Times. This global attention didn’t escape Batista himself. Fidel and his companions had become too well-known for him to simply murder.
As he was shipped off to prison, Fidel began to let his mustache grow again.