MEXICO CITY IN 1955 was a far more serene and approachable place than the traffic-clogged megalopolis it is today. Cars sidled in leisurely fashion down broad, tree-lined avenues modeled on the boulevards of Paris, and the surrounding ring of mountains was always visible under pollution-free skies. The city was Latin America’s most welcoming home for political exiles, playing the role that neutral Zurich had for Europeans during the First World War, when the likes of Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce, and Tristan Tzara congregated there.
For the Movement members who arrived one by one, Mexico City was also an inspiration: here was a Latin American city with its own confident and independent culture, and they explored it first as wide-eyed tourists. They rushed to the Zócalo, the vast plaza where Spanish cathedrals rose on the ruins of Aztec pyramids and peasant women in brilliantly colored dresses sold fiercely spiced tacos. They admired the frescos of Diego Rivera, depicting scenes of world revolution with cameo appearances by Lenin and Pancho Villa, Mexico’s own sombrero-wearing hero. And they went to the bullfights that had been banned in Cuba. Raúl was particularly impressed, and in high spirits would pretend to hold a cape in front of passing cars in the avenues.
But stimulating as it was, Fidel and his penniless followers wrestled with the logistics of expat life. They found cheap shared apartments and accepted any work they could. Calixto García took a job as a masseuse for a Mexican baseball team despite the fact that he had no experience at all. Most were forced to rely on the charity of Cuban exiles and sympathetic natives to survive. Although he was a near vagrant, Fidel lost no time in seeking out new recruits in the capital, often bewildering them with his zeal. Alberto Bayo, a Cuban veteran of the Spanish Civil War who had lost an eye in combat, recalled Fidel’s outrage that he would not commit to training a guerrilla force in Mexico that had almost no soldiers, weapons, or funds. “You are Cuban, you have an absolute obligation to help us!” Fidel roared at him. To the old soldier, Fidel’s latest plan—to return to the Oriente in a secret amphibious landing—was even more harebrained than the botched Moncada attack. He dismissed it out of hand as “child’s play.”
The Castro brothers were still receiving a small allowance from their father—$80 a month for Fidel, Raúl half that—but they might have been pushed to the edge of starvation in Mexico City were it not for María Antonia González, a well-off Cuban woman married to a local wrestler. María Antonia became the guardian angel for the wastrels of M-26-7, offering her spacious apartment in the colonial quarter as their unofficial headquarters, a safe house where they could find a bed and a meal when they were down-and-out.
It was here, at a dinner party on a chilly winter’s night, that Fidel met a quiet twenty-seven-year-old Argentine with the eyes of a poet named Ernesto Guevara de la Serna.
THANKS TO THE posthumous publication of his journal as The Motorcycle Diaries and subsequent film starring Gael García Bernal, Che’s adventurous youth wandering South America has become a part of popular culture. Like Fidel, two years his elder, he was raised in privilege—although, in Che’s case, as the eldest son of a faded aristocratic family in provincial Argentina with ties to the left-wing intelligentsia. Ernesto grew up much closer to his free-spirited, doting mother than his melancholy father. As a medical student in Buenos Aires, he was regarded as a handsome oddball who excelled at sports despite his debilitating asthma and who displayed such dubious hygiene that he was nicknamed El Chancho, “the Pig.” He was always a restless soul. After graduation he set off on his formative road trip in 1952 along the spine of the Andes with his friend Alberto Granado. That journey included a stint in a leper colony in the Peruvian Amazon, an experience that awoke him to the social injustices plaguing Latin America. Absorbing Marxist texts, he made a second trip the next year that led him to Guatemala, where he worked as a doctor for the poor. There he fell in love with a Peruvian leftist with the profile of an Inca carving, Hilda Gadea, but they were both forced to flee the country after the 1954 coup.
By the time he arrived in Mexico City, Guevara had the brooding good looks of the young Marlon Brando and a steely willpower honed by his endless struggle with asthma. He worked as a doctor in a hospital for the poor and freelance photojournalist for Argentine news agencies, and spent his spare time writing poetry with a political edge.
Raúl was his first friend among the Cuban exiles, who took him to Soviet films and bullfights. It was also Raúl who invited Ernesto and Hilda to the fateful dinner at María Antonia’s house, where Fidel was in attendance—as usual, holding forth at length as if he were at a political rally. It was the beginning, as they say, of a beautiful friendship. The introverted Ernesto observed Fidel with fascination from the sidelines until after the meal, when he took him aside to a window. The pair then launched into an intense conversation that continued for ten hours when they retired to a nearby café.
It was an attraction of opposites. Fidel was a natural exhibitionist with the strapping physique of his basketball champion days, a stark contrast to the introverted Argentine betrayed by his lungs. But they shared a belief in Latin America’s common problems, and the need for an armed uprising to snap the region from its historic chains. Fidel grilled Ernesto about his travels. Ernesto, for his part, was mesmerized by Fidel’s confidence and intellect. He was not uncritical of Fidel’s fuzzy political ideas, but at the time he simply noted in his diary that “we agreed completely.” Neither had quite shed their affluent backgrounds. Che still looked like a student doctor from the cover of a dime novel—clean-shaven, with short, neat hair—while according to Hilda, Fidel could have passed “for a well-turned-out bourgeois tourist.” But when he spoke, she added, Fidel’s eyes “lit up with passion.” His hypnotic charm, she believed, stemmed from a “truly admirable naturalness and simplicity.”
Later that day, Ernesto asked his fiancée what she made of Fidel’s plan to “invade” Cuba. Hilda recalls saying: “There’s no doubt that it’s madness, but we must be with it.” He hugged her and declared that he had already decided to go with the group as medic.
The other Cubans were at first wary of a foreigner in their midst, but most soon warmed to Ernesto and dubbed him affectionately “Che,” the Argentine slang equivalent of “buddy.” The veteran M-26-7 lawyer Melba Hernández was less impressed. When they met, Che looked her up and down and pompously declared that “a true revolutionary” would not dress with such elegant clothes and jewelry. True revolutionaries were decorated on the inside, not the outside, he opined. Melba was livid. Having experienced the Moncada and spent months in prison, she began cursing at Che as a callow middle-class playactor, and had to be pulled away by her fiancé.
THE BROAD OUTLINES of Fidel’s amphibious landing had been plotted out in prison. In Mexico City the blueprint had to be turned into reality.
Step one was to pick a landing spot in the Oriente. To this end, Fidel dispatched Pedro Miret to meet with clandestine M-26-7 agents there. Step two was to raise cash. Fidel cobbled together enough to make a seven-week fund-raising trip to the United States, where he could emulate José Martí once again by tapping the ample wallets of Cuban exiles. Fidel was given a US tourist visa without question, and in late October 1955 he bounded from the Silver Meteor train into New York’s Penn Station. The Moncada attack had galvanized Cuban-Americans, so Fidel’s return to the Monster of the North was triumphant. After his climactic speech in the ballroom of the Hotel Palm Gardens in midtown Manhattan, eight hundred Cuban patriots lined up to deposit money into a deep straw cowboy hat of the style once favored by mambí independence fighters.
It was in the Palm Gardens that Fidel also made a promise that seized new headlines across Cuba (and astonished the New York Times): “In 1956, we will be free men or we will be martyrs.” He swore to return to the island with an army within little over a year; only the precise date and location of his landing were secret. The sheer boldness of it all captured the imaginations of students back in Cuba, who began to paint M-26-7 in the streets. In New York, Fidel also spent a day with the Cuban photographer Osvaldo Salas taking promotional portraits in Central Park and other places José Martí had frequented in exile. Salas’s teenage son Roberto went one better when he and some friends climbed the Statue of Liberty and hung an M-26-7 flag from its crown. The enterprising Roberto then took photos of the striking scene and sold them to US newspapers and Life magazine.
Back in Mexico City, a financial infusion came in from an unexpected American source. From his exile in Miami Beach, Cuba’s last elected president, the suave and vain Carlos Prío, decided to funnel his considerable wealth into anti-Batista plots, including Fidel’s. Overcoming his disdain for his former enemy, Fidel accepted the millionaire’s largesse. According to one CIA agent, he even traveled to the US-Mexico border and illegally swam across the Rio Grande after dark to collect $50,000 from Prío in a motel room in Texas.
NOW M-26-7 HAD enough funds to rent a dozen apartments in Mexico City and give each recruit a living allowance—a regal eighty cents a day. These safe houses were run like radical youth hostels. No outsiders were admitted. Nobody could go into the city alone. No alcohol or telephone calls were permitted, and there was a midnight curfew. The volunteers were also bound to total secrecy, and forbidden to even discuss their personal backgrounds. It hardly needed saying that no dating was allowed outside the small pool of female Movement supporters. In their spare time the men mostly played chess; Che proved to be the only one who could beat Fidel.
By the spring of 1956, Fidel had sixty men, whose training took advantage of Mexico City’s natural setting. Like an urban fitness camp, they went on long walks up and down the tree-lined avenues and the Bosque de Chapultepec park. Afternoons were devoted to classes on “military theory” and “revolutionary education.” In an attempt to gain genuine outdoor experience, some men took to hiking nearby mountains with backpacks filled with stones. Che pushed himself to climb the 17,930-foot volcano Popocatépetl, battling asthma to the ice-covered summit. He also made the ultimate sacrifice for an Argentine, giving up steak for breakfast for a sparse guerrilla diet.
Of course, this was all a far cry from the reality of combat in the jungles of Cuba; it was like a modern mountaineer training for an Everest assault by working out on the treadmill at the gym. The one-eyed veteran Alberto Bayo, surprised that Fidel was managing to enact his wild dreams, now agreed to oversee military drills in a ranch he rented called Santa Rosa twenty-five miles outside the city. Training was now a little closer to guerrilla life, with 5:00 a.m. wake-up calls and overnight marches. Soon Bayo leased another, wilder ranch 650 miles north of the capital, where tents were erected in desolate country slithering with rattlesnakes.
Despite the ascetic regime, Mexico City wasn’t all revolution and no play, although for unmarried recruits the romantic options remained limited, to say the least. The men were not permitted to go on single dates, even with trusted compañeras—it was too much of a security risk—although double dates were permitted within the fold. Even Fidel was occasionally lured out on the town. Nightclubs were dicey: as a student, Fidel had become notorious as perhaps the only male in Cuba who couldn’t dance. (Che was also notoriously lead footed.) Even so, in a fit of optimism Raúl invited his brother to go out with two attractive young Mexican supporters of the Movement, along with Melba and her fiancé. The only condition, Raúl insisted, was that his older brother would for once refrain from gabbling about politics. As soon as the musicians struck up, everyone left the table for the dance floor except Fidel and his date. Upon their return, the others were exasperated to find Fidel holding forth like an orator on the podium to his glazed-eyed companion. Raúl kicked his brother under the table and he hurriedly changed subjects. But after a few minutes he returned to politics to the resigned sighs of all.
Only one woman was able to distract Fidel from his monomania. According to a Cuban expat supporter, the novelist Teresa Casuso, Fidel fell in love with one of her houseguests, a highly educated eighteen-year-old Cuban girl identified only as “Lilia.” Fidel met her on one of his regular visits to hide weapons in Casuso’s villa, and he was immediately captivated by Lilia’s fresh beauty, erudition, and unusual frankness in conversation. The pair secretly became engaged—at which point, the prudish Fidel insisted that his sweetheart trade in her swimsuit, a daring French bikini, for a one-piece. Sadly, Fidel became too absorbed in planning his invasion to spend much time with his young lover. She broke off the engagement and went back to her ex-fiancé. Fidel took the blow on the chin. He proudly told Lilia that she should go ahead and marry her old suitor. He did not mind, he said, because he already had his own “beautiful fiancée”: the impending revolution.
DESPITE ALL OF their precautions, the M-26-7 men were only one step ahead of the law. On June 20, after a cache of weapons was seized, Mexican police surrounded Fidel in the street and twenty-five rebels were arrested, Che among them. With clear evidence that the group was fomenting insurrection in Cuba, the Batista government pressed for extradition. It looked like Fidel’s mad enterprise was about to collapse.
Remarkably, Raúl was able to hire left-wing Mexican lawyers to have all charges dropped within a month. But a sense of urgency was now growing, with the chances of another police sweep more likely every day. Fidel still insisted that he would return to Cuba before the end of 1956 as he had promised in New York, although he still had no means of transport and had lost many weapons. Even the head organizer for M-26-7 in eastern Cuba, a twenty-two-year-old student teacher named Frank País, thought the timeline was crazy and traveled to Mexico City to beg for a delay. Fidel refused to listen. He had given his solemn oath. He passed his thirtieth birthday on August 13 without celebration and soon afterward received news of his father’s death. Outwardly, Fidel showed no emotion; he could not pause the revolution for personal indulgences such as mourning.
Fidel now had around 120 men at his disposal, mostly well-educated young professionals in their twenties and thirties, but there were still no leads on a invasion craft. Fidel scoured the arms catalogs that floated around the Mexican underground as readily as furniture brochures, spotting a US Navy surplus PT (patrol torpedo) boat for sale from a private owner in Delaware for $20,000. The fast, agile vessel had acquitted itself brilliantly in the Pacific War—the young JFK had commanded one—and it seemed perfect for the Caribbean. A sympathetic Mexican arms dealer named Antonio del Conde, known as El Cuate, “the Friend,” was dispatched to the United States to put down a 50 percent deposit, but the deal went awry when the State Department grew suspicious. (To Fidel’s fury, the owner kept the deposit.) Plan B was to buy a Catalina flying boat to whisk the rebel army to the Oriente, but Fidel scuttled the idea when he learned that it could only carry twenty-seven men.
The final choice was suitably spontaneous. After a shooting practice trip near the Gulf of Mexico, El Cuate took Fidel to inspect an old pleasure craft he wanted to buy for himself in the river port of Tuxpan. Sitting in dry dock above the muddy shore was a decaying sixty-three-foot tub called the Granma. Castro took one look and declared: “I’m taking this boat to Cuba.” At first the Mexican thought Fidel was joking: the cabin cruiser had been built to carry only two dozen passengers safely and was in dire need of basic repairs. It had sunk during a hurricane three years before and was still badly waterlogged. But Fidel’s mind was made up. (“You just can’t say no to Fidel,” El Cuate shrugged years later.) The owner, a retired American dentist who lived in Mexico City, agreed to sell the Granma—which he had named, funnily enough, for his grandmother—for $20,000.
Repairs began immediately. But by mid-November, the Granma was still barely seaworthy, when events span out of control. First, Mexican police arrested Pedro Miret and confiscated another arms cache. Then, on November 21, Fidel learned that two recruits had disappeared and were potentially turning informers. There was no time to lose. The departure date was pushed forward to the night of November 25. Coded telegrams were sent to Cuba alerting M-26-7 in Oriente. Frank País’s local operatives would have to scurry to prepare their diversionary attacks to coincide with the Granma’s arrival, which, using nautical charts, Fidel had calculated would occur exactly five days later. For better or worse, the grand adventure was about to begin.
ON SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24, Che kissed his newborn child, a little girl named Hildita, nicknamed “Little Mao” for her resemblance to the cherub-cheeked Chinese ruler, and bid good-bye to Hilda as if he were heading off on his usual weekend training trip. She had no idea that he was about to vanish to Cuba. Che did write a more explicit postcard to his mother, with whom he was still very close: “To avoid pre-mortem pathos, this card will only arrive when the potatoes are really burning, and then you will know that your son, in some sun-drenched land of the Americas, will be kicking himself for not having studied enough surgery to help a wounded man.”
Fidel, meanwhile, composed his will while sitting in a car in Tuxpan. He declared that, in the event of his death, his son Fidelito should be removed from the corrosive influence of Mirta’s pro-Batista family. Somehow Fidel had convinced his wife to let the seven-year-old visit him in Mexico City in the company of his sisters. Unsurprisingly, he refused to allow Fidelito to go home. (The well-connected Mirta had other plans; not long afterward three armed men stopped the sisters’ car in broad daylight, kidnapped Fidelito, and spirited him back to Havana. We can only speculate how these Wild West custody arrangements affected the boy’s psyche.)
Rain was pelting down after dark as volunteers arrived in the port. The river was deserted: a storm warning was in effect and the Mexican coast guard had closed down ocean traffic. Sodden groups of twos and threes made their way in silence through muddy back streets, then took rowboats to the meeting point. By late evening some 130 men, still in their civilian clothes, had gathered in the slippery weeds near where the Granma was docked. Old friends who had not seen one another for months embraced wordlessly. Many were taken aback by the modest size of the boat. Melba, who was assisting with logistics, took one look and told Fidel that he wouldn’t get more than a dozen men on board. One of Fidel’s bodyguards, Universo Sánchez, assumed the Granma was merely a transport to a larger vessel anchored elsewhere. “When do we get to the real ship?” he asked.
Dressed like an eighteenth-century Spanish nobleman in a full-length black rain cape, Fidel supervised the final loading of weapons and supplies, including Hershey’s chocolate bars, fresh fruit, and sides of ham. When he gave the go-ahead to board just after midnight, there was a sudden rush, like musical chairs. Only eighty-two men could be squeezed on in a tangle of limbs, leaving around fifty men standing forlornly on the riverbank.
The rain was pounding even harder at 2:00 a.m. when the overloaded Granma eased sluggishly from the dock. Everyone on board was hushed, the lights were off, and only one of its two engines was used at low throttle to avoid detection. The men left behind watched the Granma disappear into the darkness. Fidel and his compañeros were now out of contact, with 1,235 miles of raging seas ahead of them.