FIDEL WAS GIVEN a harsh dose of reality a few days later when he met a likable guajiro named Eutimio Guerra. The thirty-seven-year-old, who lived as a semi-bandit on the fringes of sierra society, had just returned from a journey to the lowland towns, and Fidel quizzed him for the word on the street.
“What do they say about me?”
“Well,” Eutimio shrugged. “They say you are dead.”
Fidel was mortified. After six weeks of silence, Cubans were starting to believe Batista’s claim that the Granma expedition had been wiped out. It was clearly time for the guerrillas to fire their first shots in anger. Going on the offensive would also lift the men’s shaky morale, Fidel reasoned. But he had to choose his first target carefully. If an attack failed, they would use up all their ammunition and be defenseless in the wild.
The army maintained a string of isolated garrisons where the Sierra Maestra hit the Caribbean coast, and the most vulnerable was near the village of La Plata, where only ten soldiers were posted with a sergeant. It also happened to be in a corner of the Oriente where military abuses were rampant. A few weeks earlier, six young men suspected of sympathizing with Fidel were tied up, bundled into a coast guard boat, and dumped several miles out to sea. Only one survived, swimming back to shore after fourteen hours; the others were never seen again. If nothing else, the guerrillas could expect a wellspring of sympathy in the scarred community.
SMALL-SCALE THOUGH IT was, the rebels’ first skirmish tested many of the tactics they would follow during the rest of the war. They slipped into La Plata after dark on January 15 and spent a full day staking out the army barracks, which was set in another picturesque tropical setting on a triangular spit of land between the white-sand beach and a shady river. Questioning some local farmers, they learned that the soldiers intended to have a party that night with some local Batista supporters, and that one guest, Chicho Osario, the most murderous and loathed farm foreman of the area, was about to pass by on the trail.
When the fifty-year-old Osario appeared, he was hardly a menacing sight. The man was blind drunk, waving a brandy bottle, and riding a mule with a barefoot black child. The guerrillas decided to impersonate Rural Guards to milk Osario for information, and barked for him to halt.
“Mosquito!” Osario slurred, giving the military password, before putting in his false teeth.
Fidel relieved him of his pistol and explained that he was on a “special mission” to hunt insurgents in the area. The inebriated overseer cheerfully rattled off the names of peasants he suspected of rebel sympathies. When asked what he would do if he ever captured the rebel leader Fidel Castro, Osario announced that he would “cut his balls off,” adding: “Do you see that .45 you took away from me? I’d kill him with that same gun.” Oblivious to the fact that he was signing his own death warrant, Osario then showed his captors a promissory note for twenty-five pesos from Batista’s agents, then lifted a leg to reveal Mexican-made boots. “I got these from one of the hijos de puta we killed,” he said, referring to one of the lost men from the Granma. Fidel left Osario with two guerrillas, who had orders to execute him once they heard the attack begin.
As the opening salvo of the war, the “Battle of La Plata” might not be confused with a Green Beret assault, but it went off more smoothly than expected. At 2:30 a.m., the rebels crept forward under a full moon to surround the barracks, which was little more than a brick box with a zinc roof. Two bursts from Fidel’s machine gun were the signal for the others to open fire. The soldiers inside were completely surprised. When the first barrage stopped, the rebels shouted for the soldiers to surrender. (“All we want is your armaments! Don’t be stupid! While Batista and his cronies are robbing without the slightest risk, you are going to die without glory in the Sierra Maestra!”) The offer was answered with gunfire. The rebels lobbed two hand grenades, but they were virtual museum pieces, obtained from Brazilian army surplus, and they failed to go off. A stick of dynamite fizzled as well. Finally, Che and Luis Crespo crept forward to torch a connected hut. It was a storeroom for coconuts and went up like a bonfire, forcing the choking soldiers to spill out with their arms in the air.
The combat had lasted forty minutes; two of the ten soldiers were dead; three more would expire from their wounds. The rebels had not suffered a scratch.
In his diary, Raúl recorded the conversation with the captives—many of whom were even younger than the guerrillas—and although it has a sanctimonious air, it is probably close to the truth.
“Why didn’t you surrender earlier?” one rebel asked in exasperation.
“We thought you would shoot us if we did.”
“That’s what the government wants!” Raúl interrupted. “To foment hatred between us. But at the end of the day we’re brothers, and we regret the death of your companions, who are young Cubans just like us. You’re fighting for one man, we’re fighting for an ideal.” Fidel then gave the perplexed captives a formal speech: “I congratulate you. You behaved like men. You are now free. Look after your wounded, and leave whenever you want.” The guerrillas had already donated their handkerchiefs and belts to the injured soldiers as tourniquets. To Che’s annoyance, Fidel also left them precious medicine, a precedent that would continue throughout the war.
THE REBELS WERE elated by their first taste of victory. There was now a glimmer of hope that Fidel’s deranged sense of confidence might actually have some basis. Without a single casualty, they had seized a valuable cache of weapons, bullets, and tinned food—“even rum,” Che gloated. For the first time since Alegría del Pío, every man now carried some sort of weapon. This established another guerrilla tenet: wherever possible, they should resupply themselves with munitions seized from the enemy rather than rely on outside support.
But the propaganda effect of La Plata was far greater than its military value. Word of the assault filtered throughout Cuba, providing proof that at least some of the Granma expeditionaries were alive and carrying out their promises. Within the Sierra Maestra, the execution of the drunken “exploiter of the people,” Chicho Osario, also sent a message to the guajiros that generations of cruel mistreatment by landowners would now be avenged.
As they dissolved back into the mountains, the rebels celebrated by washing. Few rivers they had found so far were big enough for bathing, and the perfume of stale sweat permeated their camps. Che was particularly rank, and regained his childhood nickname, El Chancho, “the Pig.” He was notorious for an almost total indifference to worldly cares, never brushing his teeth and devouring whatever food was available, even rotten meat. Raúl was more fastidious. When they found a broad, idyllic river surrounded by ferns and waterfalls on January 21, he rejoiced like a schoolboy: “¡Caray!” (“Wow!”) After a swim, he slept for twelve hours straight.
MEANWHILE, IN MANZANILLO, readers of the local gossip columns were enjoying the delicious news that Celia Sánchez, former beauty queen and leading charity organizer, had been arrested as a revolutionary—and, even juicier, she had made a daring escape. Some of the town’s most respectable women let it be known that Celia could take refuge in their homes. An old friend of the family named Hector Llópiz (Angela’s husband) also volunteered to be Celia’s minder, shuffling her from one comfortable abode to the next during siesta hours and giving her a private code name, “the Dove.” Much to his annoyance, his charge refused to dress down while in hiding and would even wear loud striped dresses and cat eye sunglasses during “secret” moves.
In this way, Celia was able to operate under the noses of the police. Her account books from this embryonic period of the uprising survive, with itemized purchases for the guerrillas neatly printed out by date. In total, the expenses for December 1956 were $1,956.70 and, for January 1957, $2,094.60. We also have the list for February (boots for Fidel and Raúl, $19; ham, tinned milk, and chocolate, $89.90), coming to a modest $1,756.55. The average monthly cost of the revolution in its first three months was thus roughly $65 a day.
Celia also organized a network of young women who were not full-fledged members of M-26-7 but were inspired by her bravery, her commitment, and her fashion sense. These well-groomed operatives became excellent couriers by manipulating the Cuban macho culture: they would travel with businessmen sympathetic to the Movement, aware that soldiers at checkpoints would never dare to search a lady in the company of a wealthy older gent; to do so would be a sign of disrespect. The women also sewed uniforms, wrote letters of support to the guerrillas, and solicited donations. Perhaps most crucial, female recruits were telephone operators, who could tap into the lines. On one occasion, Celia was tipped off that police were about to storm her safe house, giving her time to escape using a bed sheet hung from a high rear window.
THE GUERRILLAS’ LEARNING curve was far from linear. Despite the modest victory at La Plata, the rebel force had a long way to go before it might be taken for a serious threat to the ruling order. “Our column lacked cohesion,” Che complained later; it had no esprit de corps or (worse in his eyes) “ideological awareness.” They were also still embarrassingly green. Che’s own glorious career nearly ended prematurely when a jittery Camilo Cienfuegos spotted him in the distance wearing an army helmet taken as a spoil of war from La Plata. Mistaking Che for the vanguard of an enemy patrol, Camilo took a potshot at him. Luckily he missed, his rifle jammed, and Che managed to identify himself. Instead of snapping into action, the sound of gunfire prompted everyone else to dive into the bushes.
Their newly found sense of confidence was repeatedly challenged. Early on January 30 the guerrillas were cooking breakfast in a high forest clearing when they heard the drone of airplanes overhead. Bombs whistled down from American-supplied B-26s; the entire landscape was suddenly erupting around them. Their stove was split in two, and the panicked rebels scattered into the jungle. It took them several days to regroup in a cave they had marked for rendezvous, enduring agonizing spells of thirst and hunger that harkened back to the dark days after the Granma landing. On the positive side, shell-shocked though they were, the men all managed to hold on to their weapons and meet up safely. Raúl and Che had assumed command of two of the three wandering groups; they were now acknowledged as the most capable leaders under Fidel.
The accuracy of the bombing was suspicious; it was as if the pilot knew their precise whereabouts. As Che noted dryly, it was a “unique display of marksmanship, never again equaled throughout the war.”
Finding new recruits was another problem. The first few volunteers from the cities were invariably shocked by just how grueling life in the Sierra Maestra really was. Of nine men who hiked up from Manzanillo to join them in early February, five gave up after only a couple of nights bivouacking in the forest; one man gave the excuse that he had come down with tuberculosis. The handful of campesino volunteers showed more mettle, but midnight desertions plagued the rebel army. Che began to recognize a possible absconder when he saw “the look of a trapped animal” in his eyes. One new recruit cracked up entirely. He began to shout at the top of his voice that “he was being chased by planes and there was no place to hide, no food and no water” and had to be sent home.
To keep new men in line, Fidel made a speech declaring that the death penalty would be meted out for “desertion, insubordination and defeatism.” But fleeing into the sierra carried its own dangers: one luckless teenage recruit, Sergio Acuña, ran away only to be captured by the army. He was tortured, shot four times, and hung. When the boy’s corpse was discovered, Che coolly noted that “it was a great lesson for our troops.”
DESPITE ALL THIS dogged activity in the Sierra, Cubans still had no hard evidence that Fidel himself was alive. The comandante decided to take matters into his own hands. He sent a directive to Celia that she should smuggle a journalist from a top-ranking American publication into the mountains for an interview. Celia passed the demand onto M-26-7 agents in Havana, where the Granma veteran Faustino Pérez had been sent to oversee operations, and within a few days the proposal was being shopped around. Soon a decision that would change the fate of the revolution was being made in a newsroom in midtown Manhattan.