FOR HOURS AFTER the December 5 ambush Fidel had remained alone in his cane field near Alegría del Pío, hiding under a pile of leaves, half-choked with smoke and listening to soldiers stomp past on nearby trails. Only as the sun began to set did he risk a glance around. Two other guerrillas were cowering in the same field, and Fidel whistled quietly to get their attention. When they crawled over to join him, they turned out to be Faustino, the former physician, and Universo Sánchez, one of his burly young bodyguards. Their prospects were not promising. Fidel still had his rifle with its telescopic sights, but in the anarchy of the retreat Faustino had dropped his weapon and Universo lost his boots. None of them had saved any food or drinking water.
After shivering through the night, Fidel declared that they would dash to the forest and start hiking to the Sierra Maestra. He got into a whispered argument with the other two, who felt there was still far too much military activity to risk moving. “Damn it, Fidel,” Universo finally hissed. “Democratically, it’s two against one, so we stay!” It was one of the very few times that Fidel allowed himself to be talked out of anything.
In the end the trio stayed put for five excruciating days. The afternoon heat was asphyxiating; by night they froze in the damp winter air. For sustenance they gnawed on sugarcane and licked morning dew. Fidel muttered incessantly about how the guerrillas would recover from their defeat and regroup in the mountains. Faustino and Universo did not have the heart to contradict him. “Victory will be ours,” Fidel kept repeating like a mantra. “We are winning!” Universo recalled thinking, “Mierda, he’s gone crazy!”
Fidel later joked that in the cane field he was commander in chief of an army of three. Despite his bluster, he slept with his rifle pointed under his chin so that he could shoot himself if they were discovered, ignoring his companions’ objection that the gun was far more likely to go off by accident. For his part, Universo was convinced it was only a matter of time before they were discovered by the army, and spent his time carving his name on his rifle butt with a bayonet. He wanted his family to be able to recognize his corpse.
Their patience paid off. On December 10, their fifth day in hiding, they noticed a marked drop in army movement. The trio decided to leave that same night, so the bootless Universo lined his socks with strips of sugarcane husk to protect his feet. (He was so traumatized by the experience that when he was finally given decent boots, he refused to take them off even to sleep.) They crept along slowly, making as little noise as possible, and covered only three miles before dawn. After two more nights of hiking, the bedraggled group spotted the moonlit silhouette of the Sierra Maestra on the horizon. Feeling a little safer, they decided to knock on a farmhouse door. Fidel’s luck held. The family had never heard of M-26-7 but were sympathetic: they offered them a delectable meal of roast pork, root vegetables, and the first fresh water they had drunk in a week.
Two nights later, December 14, their prospects improved further when the three made contact with a stocky, powerfully built twenty-seven-year-old campesino named Guillermo García. He had been one of Celia’s first rural recruits and volunteered to guide the trio across a highly patrolled road into the sierra proper. They spent nearly twenty-four hours in a culvert near a village, observing guards move back and forth, until García felt the noise of a jukebox and Saturday night partying in a nearby bodega would cover any noise they might make. They then crawled through the drainage pipe over rotting vegetables and mud to the other side.
At last, on the morning of December 16—exactly two weeks after the Granma landing, and after marching for eleven hours straight under a gleaming full moon—they saw an idyllic bohío, a thatch-roofed shack, nestled among palm trees and coffee terraces. They had reached Cinco Palmas, the home of Ramón “Mongo” Pérez Montano, the baby brother of the patriarch Crescencio Pérez, which Celia had designated as the regrouping point should the guerrillas become separated. Fidel and his men had finally made their way into the bosom of the rural resistance. The twenty-four-year-old Mongo immediately recognized Fidel from photographs and brought the emaciated trio reviving cups of sugary coffee. Before dozing off in a coconut grove, they took off their shoes and socks. Mongo was shocked to see their feet as encrusted with blood as if they’d dipped them in a trough.
TO FIDEL’S DISTRESS, Mongo had no news to offer about the fate of the other guerrillas. As far as anyone knew, he and his two friends were the only ones who had escaped the ambush. Then, two nights later, the three were wolfing down pork and fried plantains at Mongo’s table when a farmer burst in with the revolution’s first concrete piece of good news. Raúl was alive with four companions, and he was only a mile away.
“¡Concho!” Fidel exclaimed. “My brother! Where is he? Is he armed?”
The farmer was carrying a letter from Raúl with his Mexican driver’s license as proof of his identity. Still, Fidel was wary of an army trap. He sent the campesino back to ask Raúl to write down the names of all the foreigners who had sailed on the Granma. A letter soon returned identifying Che Guevara and three others.
Fidel was ecstatic. His rebel army had more than doubled in number, from three men to eight. At midnight Raúl was finally permitted to visit Mongo’s house. According to the eyewitnesses, no sooner had the Castro brothers embraced than Fidel wanted to know how many guns Raúl had saved.
“Five,” Raúl said.
“Well, we have two!” Fidel exulted. “That makes seven.” Then he declared: “Now we’ve won the war.”
The others shot sidelong glances at one another. Despite the litany of disasters, Fidel’s Olympian self-confidence had not been dented.
THAT NIGHT, THE new arrivals recounted their own extraordinary survival story, the details of which can be reconstructed from Raúl’s meticulous pocket diary from the time. On the night of the ambush, he and his four compañeros had stumbled into one another in the forest near the battle site, unaware that Fidel was hiding only a few hundred yards away. They also spent five grueling days in hiding before deeming it safe to leave, with the added aggravation of mosquito plagues. These were Raúl’s particular bane: they loved biting his nose, leaving it as swollen, he complained, as Cyrano de Bergerac’s. He lay awake at nights, tormented by the thought that his brother had been killed and listening to the land crabs that crashed ghoulishly through the thickets. One morning Raúl was disconcerted to find that the alien creatures had torn to shreds the sleeve of a shirt he had left out.
The five men left their hideout on the same day as Fidel’s group and unknowingly followed a parallel route to the Sierra Maestra. At first, Raúl found the mountain range a “magnificent spectacle” in the starlight. He became less enthusiastic when his group became trapped in a dead-end ravine and had to make a tortuous climb out over steep ridges. But soon they were welcomed by friendly peasants who offered food and café con leche, often at 3:00 in the morning. Raúl had no money, so he left IOUs to be paid after la victoria. (“If we die, [the bearer] can take this document to any official body of the future Revolutionary Government” for cash reimbursement, he wrote.)
On December 18, they knocked on the hut of the farmer Hermes Cardero, who opened the door with a revolver in hand, convinced the group were Rural Guards in disguise. “I really am Raúl Castro, the brother of Fidel!” Raúl kept insisting. When Cardero told him that there were three unidentified guerrillas staying at the nearby Cinco Palmas farm, Raúl excitedly whipped off his letter and added his driver’s license to make contact.
THREE DAYS LATER, Mongo’s wife opened her door to find eight scarecrow figures dressed in torn peasant clothes. The most abject of all was in virtual rags, she later recalled, missing a shoe and doubled over from a severe asthma attack. It was Che.
This third guerrilla group had also survived by a mix of sheer luck and obsessive caution. After the ambush, the lightly wounded Che hid in a cave with Juan Almeida and three other men. Instead of staying put, they decided it was safer to head east for the Sierra Maestra that same night, using what Che thought was the North Star as guidance. Only when they hit the southern coast two days later did they realize he was completely wrong. On a more encouraging note, they ran into three other lost Granma members, including the dashing Camilo Cienfuegos.
The group, now eight, bickered about whether to ask farmers for food. Camilo, a self-confessed hedonist, was “as hungry as a piranha,” as the saying went, and argued it was worth taking the chance. The more austere Che lobbied for caution. He turned out to be right. On one occasion they all crept up to a hut and heard music inside. It was an army platoon drinking to the victory at Alegría del Pío. Another night, they spotted a farmhouse nestled by a lovely river mouth. When Che went to investigate, he almost ran into a soldier with a carbine. They had found themselves in Boca del Toro, where the treacherous Manolo Capitán had delivered ten rebels up for execution only a few days earlier. Skirting the site, the eight climbed down to a desolate beach where Camilo chased crabs and devoured their flesh raw.
Their group’s luck improved dramatically on December 12 when the family of a Seventh-day Adventist pastor took the famished rebels in and provided them “an uninterrupted festival of food,” as Che put it, although with predictably dire digestive results. (“In a flash, eight unappreciative intestines gave evidence of the blackest ingratitude.”) As word spread of their presence, curious campesinos came from all around to meet the exotic rebels. One woman brought candy and cigars as welcome offerings to the “saviors of Cuba” she had expected for so long, but when she set eyes on the men, they looked so pathetic that she burst into tears. The embarrassed Che accepted the gifts and boiled her a cup of coffee, “since she was so moved to see us.”
The group now decided to change into peasant clothes and bury their few guns so they could travel incognito; only the leaders, Che and Almeida, kept pistols. As they meandered on, Che began to be racked by asthma and the others had to help him walk. It would take another nine days before they reached Mongo’s refuge. But Fidel’s initial delight at seeing them quickly turned to fury when he learned that they had left their guns behind. He dressed down Che in front of the other men, even though the Argentine was still barely able to breathe—“To leave your weapons behind was criminal and stupid!”—and angrily gave Che’s pistol to Mongo as punishment. His fall from grace was short-lived, but Che would never forget the humiliation of losing favor with his idol.
Slowly the rump of the rebel army was regathering: now they were a force of sixteen men with seven rifles against Batista’s cohorts.
AS THESE DISPARATE groups were zigzagging the sierra, Celia Sánchez was also still a fugitive. After her escape from the police, she had managed to dodge roadblocks and walk to her hometown Manzanillo, at one point hiding with friendly prostitutes in a dance hall. She was still scratched and bloody from her maribú hideout; soon a family friend found a doctor to remove thirteen thorns from her scalp. (“Like Jesus Christ’s Crown of Thorns,” Celia joked.) For the next two weeks, news about the Granma landing was confused and contradictory, but the steady flow of murdered guerrillas did nothing to dent Celia’s conviction that Fidel was still alive. Despite all their bragging, the army had not produced his body. Hoping for information, she traveled to Santiago in disguise to meet with Frank, cutting her hair short and crafting a fake belly from chicken wire to pretend to be pregnant. Although wanted posters for her were all over the Oriente, she and her companion Eugenia “Geña” Verdecia joined their bus driver for coffee with soldiers at a military checkpoint. But Frank had no news.
It was not until the night of December 18 that Mongo Pérez breathlessly appeared at Celia’s door with news that Fidel was alive. Celia turned to her host, Angela Llópiz, and hugged her. “See, Angela, I told you so,” she laughed, and immediately set about finding treats for Mongo to take back with him to the mountains.
The rebellion was hanging by the barest of threads but somehow held fast.