AT 5:30 PM on Friday, February 15, the telephone rang in a suite of the Sevilla-Biltmore Hotel on the edge of Old Havana. “You will be picked up in an hour,” intoned the voice on the line in accented English. “Be sure you are ready.” The guest, fifty-seven-year-old New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews, had been instructed to dress like a rich American tourist on a fishing holiday—not a difficult task, given his dry academic demeanor. (Matthews’s biographer, Anthony DePalma, describes him as “a tall man, thin, half-bald, a simple dresser, silent as a tomb, precise as a Swiss watch.”) One of the most famous war correspondents of his generation, Matthews had just finished packing his knapsack with the essentials for the excursion: hiking boots, a warm coat, a small box camera, and a jaunty black newsboy-style cap. His English-born wife, Nancie, who was also going partway on the trip, was unimpressed by the short notice. She was getting ready to dye her hair and said that it was impossible to be dressed in an hour. Matthews reminded her that they weren’t going to a ritzy beach resort; they were taking a secret all-night drive with revolutionaries. Fashion was not a top priority.
To Nancie’s annoyance, the M-26-7 agents didn’t turn up in an hour. Nor in two. To pass the time, the Matthewses walked around the corner to the Floridita bar-restaurant, a favorite of their good friend and Havana resident Ernest Hemingway, to have a frozen daiquiri and a plate of fresh stone crab.
Finally, later that evening, a Plymouth sedan rolled up driven by Javier Pazos, a banker’s son turned activist, along with a couple introduced as Marta and Luis. Only later would Matthews learn that the attractive and spruced-up “Marta” was Liliam Mesa, another of the adventurous socialites who had become a Movement supporter. (“The extent to which the women of Cuba were caught up in the passion of the rebellion was extraordinary,” Matthews later wrote, “for like all Latin women they were brought up to lead sheltered, non-public and non-political lives.”) “Luis” was Fidel’s old comrade in arms, Faustino Pérez. As the car rumbled onto the dark Carretera Central—the two-lane Central Highway that runs the length of the island—they chatted about the rebellion and sang Cuban songs. Matthews was thrilled at the adventure, Nancie tired and irritable.
The coming weekend would qualify as one of the great turning points of the guerrilla war, as three major dramas unfolded. The first and most famous involved the Times reporter. But Fidel had also invited the top leadership of M-26-7, known as the National Directorate, to meet him in the Sierra Maestra to discuss how the rebellion might recover from its disastrous start. Celia would be hiking into the mountains at the same time as Matthews, along with Haydée Santamaría and her new husband, the lawyer Armando Hart, who had both flown in from Havana. Joining them from Santiago would be Frank País and Vilma Espín, a striking young woman who had become a key underground organizer in the city. The twenty-six-year-old daughter of a wealthy lawyer for the Bacardi rum company, Vilma had studied chemical engineering at MIT in Boston and could also serve as an English translator. The high-powered pair from Santiago was also bringing cigars, candy, and ham as presents for the guerrillas; as a cover while they drove to the trailhead, they filled their car trunk with bottled drinks and a boxed cake so they could tell soldiers at checkpoints that they were going to a wedding.
The third great drama that would occur on that fateful weekend is the least known; the guerrillas would stage their first and most traumatic trial, meting out “revolutionary justice” to a traitor in their midst.
MATTHEWS’S JOURNEY, THE modern answer to Stanley’s cross-Africa trek to find Livingstone, was the result of convoluted logistical planning. No sooner had Fidel requested an American journalist than M-26-7 agents put out feelers to the only permanent stringer in Havana, Ruby Hart Phillips of the New York Times. Phillips was a fast-talking, chain-smoking reporter who burbled with as much nervous energy as a character out of His Girl Friday (although, to dodge the rampant sexism of the 1950s, she used a byline “R. Hart Phillips” to obscure her gender). The initial contact was made through a pillar of the Cuban establishment: Javier Pazos’s father, Felipe, the former director of the National Bank of Cuba and one of the country’s leading economists. When they met, the fifty-eight-year-old Phillips almost blew things immediately. “You have contact with Fidel Castro?” she blurted out in her office, to the horror of Pazos. Luckily, the Batista censor who was posted at the Times to monitor telephone calls and cables did not overhear her faux pas.
Phillips understood that it would be a major coup to land the first interview with Fidel. Modern print reporters can only be nostalgic for the power of the press in the 1950s, when eyewitness stories, syndicated around the world, could have enormous impact. But she was worried that Batista would have her deported if she wrote the story herself. Instead, she sent a cryptic cable to the New York office asking to bring in an outsider. Herbert Matthews, who had covered almost every major news story of the twentieth century, was the obvious choice. He had lived in Paris in the 1930s, reported on the Spanish Civil War with his buddy Hemingway, and been imprisoned in Italy during World War Two. What’s more, he had a rare interest in Cuban politics. It was Matthews who had written the Times editorial marveling at the “mad” Granma landing in December.
In Havana, Matthews leapt at the chance to break the story that Fidel was alive. Despite his reserved manner, he was a romantic at heart and felt an urge to lend support to this quixotic “youth rebellion” (as Phillips described it) against the repugnant Batista. But Javier Pazos was visibly taken aback by Matthews’s age and apparent frailty. With his tailored suit and a pipe clenched between his teeth, he looked more like a staid Princeton don than a hard-bitten war correspondent capable of hiking into the sierra.
“Will you send for someone from New York?” Pazos asked politely.
“No,” Matthews replied tersely. “I’ll go myself.”
ON THE ALL-NIGHT drive to the Oriente, soldiers at roadblocks took one look at the dapper Matthews and Nancie in her white turban and waved them on. The group spent the next afternoon resting at a safe house in Manzanillo, then, after dark, a jeep driven by Celia’s most trusted farmhand, Felipe Guerra Matos, arrived to conduct Matthews and Pazos along the first stretch of the trail. (Nancie remained in Manzanillo; Liliam and Faustino would hike up separately with the other M-26-7 top brass.)
They began their trek into the dripping forest at midnight. According to the driver-guide, Matthews promptly slipped on a rock while crossing a stream and fell. “El Americano has fucked up!” Guerra yelled to Pazos. He rushed over and gave Matthews his hand, worried that he had broken a leg or twisted an ankle. But the reporter simply got up with a carefree laugh, his pipe still clenched between his teeth. By good fortune, the knapsack containing his camera had not gone under.
When they reached the rendezvous point, nobody was there to meet them. The Cubans scouted the area for two hours, whistling softly to find their contact, while Matthews sat dozing on a muddy bank until mosquitoes woke him. At last, a new guide materialized from the darkness. It was 5:00 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, February 17, by the time they all arrived at a farmhouse where a small group of guerrillas was waiting for Fidel. The property was considerably lower and more exposed than other rebel hideouts, but Fidel had decided that its relative accessibility made it worth the risk.
The guerrillas laid down a blanket for Matthews to rest in a clearing. Raúl broke the ice by asking “How are you?” in English, but could not understand the American’s answer. Luckily, Matthews’s Spanish was good from his Civil War days. Over a breakfast of dried crackers and coffee, the men chatted in hushed tones about their lives. Fidel had already briefed them on what to tell the reporter. One man explained that he had volunteered because soldiers had dragged his brother from his home and shot him dead. (“I’d rather be here, fighting for Fidel, than anywhere in the world now,” he declared.) Another talked about playing baseball in the US.
Fidel made his appearance in the first rays of dawn like a character in a Western. The bushes parted with a spray of morning dew and he strode into the clearing wearing a fresh set of fatigues and khaki cap, his beloved rifle on his shoulder. By way of introduction, he proudly showed Matthews the weapon’s telescopic sights, boasting that he could pick off soldiers with it at 1,000 yards. For the next three hours the interview was conducted in Spanish with Vilma as backup translator. With his instinctive theatrical flair, Fidel crouched by Matthews’s side and spoke in a whisper, making every word seem an urgent, intimate confidence.
Fidel stage-managed every aspect of the meeting carefully. In fact, if he had not become a revolutionary, he would have had a stellar career in advertising. He wanted in particular to convince Matthews that the rebel army was far larger and better organized than it was. His eighteen battered guerrillas had cleaned themselves up as best they could, although many still wore torn uniforms and boots held together by wire; one man had to walk sideways so that the reporter would not see that his shirt had no back. In one fine touch, a breathless messenger interrupted the interview with news from the “second front”—which didn’t exist. (“Wait until I’m finished,” the comandante coolly ordered.) Fidel spoke loftily about his various platoons of “ten to forty” guerrillas who were roaming other parts of the Sierra Maestra, although he would not say the exact number “for obvious reasons.”
Fidel later said that he carried out an even more outrageous deception, ordering his men to walk in circles through the forest around the camp, changing uniforms as they went, to give Matthews an inflated view of their real numbers. Anthony DePalma, who wrote the most detailed account of the meeting, defends Matthews’s reputation: he considers such play-acting “unlikely” given the topography of the farm, although he admits that only Fidel knew the real truth. Still, it hardly seems beyond the realm of possibility. When Fidel declared that the rebels had fifty telescopic rifles on hand, for example, Matthews accepted the exaggeration without question.
Whatever the reason, Fidel’s gambit worked. Matthews gained the impression that the rebel army totaled several hundred men across the sierra, which squared with the figures he had heard from Ruby Hart Phillips and US embassy sources in Havana. Part of it may also have been wishful thinking. The older man was drawn to the feisty underdogs in Cuba, just as he had been to the embattled Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. (As Fidel later confided to Che: “The gringo showed friendliness and didn’t ask any trick questions.”)
As proof that the interview had indeed occurred, Matthews asked Fidel to sign his notes. The signature still survives on a trimmed piece of paper in the Columbia University archive: a single carefully penned line, Fidel Castro, Sierra Maestra, Febrero 17 de 1957. Matthews then asked a rebel soldier to take a photo of them both. He flew with Nancie back to Havana, where they dined with their celebrity friends Ernest and Mary Hemingway at the Finca Vigía, the writer’s “lookout house” on the rural fringe of the city. In a cab to the airport the next morning, Matthews debated the best way to get his notes through Cuban customs. If the officers saw Castro’s signature, the pages would be confiscated. Nancie offered to smuggle them in her girdle. After takeoff, she slipped into the plane’s restroom to remove them. Matthews began writing his story on board.
THAT SAME HISTORIC weekend saw a meeting that would prove just as significant for the revolution. It had occurred not long after dawn on Saturday, as Celia was climbing up a mountainside with Frank País—she wearing a white shirt and slacks, he in full battle regalia of khakis, rifle, and helmet. As they groped through light fog, they ran into Fidel and his bodyguard Ciro Redondo. It was the first time Fidel had met the legendary “Norma,” whose rural support network had saved his life. Thus began one of the great collaborations of revolutionary history, whose importance has been forgotten in the loving attention given to, say, the bromance of Fidel and Che. Sadly, nobody recorded the conversation between Celia and Fidel that morning, so we don’t know whether there was an instant attraction. However, a lovely photograph survives of Fidel showing Celia his pride and joy, his telescopic rifle. A gun aficionado herself, she is looking on with genuine delight. The slender, dark-haired “doctor’s daughter” was in many ways the perfect match for Fidel: seven years his senior, she was entirely comfortable with the outdoor life and (more importantly) she shared Fidel’s monomania for the cause.
In late afternoon, Fidel began the M-26-7 summit meeting in a makeshift hut. Celia, Raúl, Che, Vilma, and Frank were now joined by the Movement’s other top leaders, including Haydée, Faustino, and Armando Hart. Many were old friends who had not seen one another since the Mexico days. “Hugs exchanged, general happiness,” Raúl noted in his diary. “We passed a very happy day eating the candies they had brought us.” The meeting of Fidel and Celia was not the only incipient romance at the picnic. Raúl briefly notes the presence of “V-A Espina” (Vilma Espín), “the friendly santiagueña who has been so useful to the Movement.”
She would later become his wife, but at the time, Vilma was more interested in meeting the mysterious leftist doctor Che Guevara, whom she and the others had assumed was in his forties or fifties because of his education and breadth of experience.
“Let me look at your face,” she recalled saying to the Argentine. “Ah . . . but . . . you are a very young man. How old are you?”
Che said he was twenty-eight.
“We all thought you would be an old man! You don’t have an Argentine accent.”
“That’s because I’m international,” he joked.
Vilma couldn’t help noticing that Che’s trousers had become unstitched at the crotch and revealed his underpants. She and the other women got to work patching them on the spot. Che made his own observations of the group in his private journal. For a start, he noted that the candies Celia brought the guerrillas “provoked, naturally, a series of indigestions.” He also wrote that he was impressed by Celia and Vilma, but with a dire lack of chivalry dismissed the socialite Liliam Mesa as little more than a guerrilla groupie: she was, he thought, “a great admirer of the Movement who seems to me to want to fuck more than anything else.”
Pleasant though the reunion was, both Frank and Celia were shocked by the shape of the rebel army. As far as they could see, the tiny force was a grimy shambles, and there was an excellent chance that Fidel would be trapped and killed. Over a dinner of chicken stew, rice, and malanga root, the pair tried to convince him to give up the armed struggle and start afresh in Mexico. They were startled by Fidel’s response: “We only need a few thousand bullets and a reinforcement of twenty armed men and we’ll win the war against Batista!” They were dumbfounded by his confidence, but Fidel refused to budge. He insisted that to leave the sierra now would make the Cuban people lose faith in him. Frank and Celia reluctantly agreed to equip new recruits and funnel them up from Manzanillo.
Privately, they still had their concerns. Fidel was disorganized, capricious, and petulant. Celia in particular was astounded to learn that he stomped on his spectacles whenever he flew into a rage; the sheer logistics of replacing them made such lack of self-control bizarrely childish. Frank was also worried by the obvious lack of discipline in the army. Even their weapons were filthy with mud and grease. While they were chatting, he started to casually clean their guns, a silent rebuke that the guerrillas took to heart.
But most dangerous were Fidel’s lapses of judgment, Frank felt. He trusted people too easily.
FRANK’S OBSERVATION WAS borne out by the third drama of that pivotal weekend, the trial of the peasant guide, Eutimio Guerra. Short, wiry, and brimming with good cheer, Eutimio had been a favorite with Fidel and his men ever since he had first welcomed them to his farm near Pico Caracas, plied them with suckling pig and coffee spiced with cognac, and let them sleep in his cockfighting arena. He seemed the very embodiment of the “noble peasant” who was going to carry the revolution to victory, and soon became their trusted full-time guide. Fidel particularly admired Eutimio’s almost supernatural ability to slip through enemy lines and return with such treasures as condensed milk, cigars, and working flashlights.
The guerrillas never seemed to notice that Eutimio’s absence coincided with a string of unlucky incidents, including the bombardment that had almost decimated them on January 30. Fidel’s suspicions were only aroused by accident when a farmer reported that he had seen 140 soldiers gathered nearby and casually added that Eutimio was with them. Incredulous, Fidel realized that the army was perilously close to surrounding their camp. Seconds later, bullets began to whistle around them. A recruit standing next to Fidel was shot in the head and killed instantly. In the desperate rout that followed, Che lost his medicine, his books, and even his rifle. The guerrillas remained on the run for four days.
Eutimio’s road to betrayal had in fact begun in late January, when he was arrested by the army and offered an unenviable choice: they would either hang him from the nearest tree or give him a reward—$10,000 cash plus prime farmland—if he would turn informer. Choosing the latter, Eutimio became responsible for the guerrillas’ run of “bad luck.” The air attack of January 30 had been eerily accurate because he was in the spotter plane, pointing out their exact location to the pilot. Eutimio also came shockingly close to murdering Fidel. On one unusually cold night, he slept alongside the comandante in a hut and even shared his blanket, with his pistol resting inches from Fidel’s head. Che later blamed Eutimio’s “cowardice” for not pulling the trigger. More likely, Eutimio knew that he would not escape alive if he murdered Fidel in a camp surrounded by sentries.
Now, a few hours after Matthews left on Sunday the 17th, a guerrilla ran into camp yelling, “The prick! The prick! The prick is here!” Eutimio was hiking towards them, oblivious to the fact that his betrayal had been exposed. The rebels pretended to greet him warmly until the muscular Ciro Redondo gave Eutimio a bear hug from behind and refused to let go, while another man disarmed him. “But what’s going on?” Eutimio said. “Have you gone crazy?” When they frisked him and found two pages folded in his breast pocket, the peasant visibly paled. “Don’t read those,” he begged. “Shoot me first.” They were safe conduct passes issued by the army.
Eutimio was brought before the assembled guerrillas in handcuffs for the first revolutionary trial in the Sierra Maestra. Standing in an open field, Fidel cross-examined him; then Ciro launched into a sermon in the tone of a wounded friend, explaining the pain his betrayal had caused. The death of their compañero in the army ambush meant that mercy was impossible. Heavy clouds had gathered; now light rain turned into a thunderstorm. Fidel ordered the death penalty but did not choose an executioner. Instead, he simply walked away to get out of the rain under a tree. The other rebels fell into awkward silence; nobody was willing to carry out the sentence.
It was Che who finally stepped forward. “The situation was uncomfortable,” he noted in his diary, “so I ended the problem giving [Eutimio] a shot with a .32 in the right side of the brain.” He clinically added that the “exit hole” was on “the right temporal [lobe].” Lightning was crackling so loudly that the gunshot was drowned out. The execution, biographer Jon Lee Anderson notes, was one more element in Che’s growing mystique. He already had a reputation for reckless bravery, as if to compensate for his asthma. Now he was displaying a ruthless clarity of vision. From that moment forward, it was Che who would cold-bloodedly enact the most difficult decisions.
But Che was more shaken than he let on. In his diary he records what seems like a hallucination: as he was trying to take a watch from Eutimio’s belt, he heard the dead man say to him: “Yank it off, boy, what does it matter?” Che also records of that night: “We slept badly, wet, and I with something of asthma.” It was the start of a respiratory attack that would last ten days. In public, Che kept up more of a front. As he later wrote of the incident in the rebels’ underground newspaper, the “timid stage of the revolution” was at an end.
ON FEBRUARY 24TH, Herbert Matthews’s story was splashed across the front page of the Sunday New York Times: CUBAN REBEL IS VISITED IN HIS HIDEOUT. Its first line set the positive tone: “Fidel Castro, the rebel leader of Cuba’s youth, is alive and fighting hard and successfully in the rugged, almost impenetrable fastnesses of the Sierra Maestra . . .” For M-26-7, it was a PR triumph of the first order. Readers learned that Batista’s elite troops were locked in “a thus-far losing battle” with the guerrillas, while Fidel himself was painted as a cross between Pancho Villa and James Dean. He was “quite a man—a powerful six-footer, olive-skinned, full-faced,” Matthews wrote, whose “brown eyes flash.” Matthews’s compliments pile up: “The personality of the man is overpowering”; Fidel displays “extraordinary eloquence.” He is also the very picture of idealism and moderation. “Above all,” Fidel is quoted as saying, “we are fighting for a democratic Cuba and an end to the dictatorship.” He then assures Times readers that he and his men harbor “no animosity towards the United States or the American people.” Matthews was not entirely uncritical, noting that Fidel had little grasp of economic issues and was no military genius. But the conclusion was resounding: “From the looks of things, General Batista cannot possibly hope to suppress the Castro revolt.”
It was an astonishing plug for an eighteen-man army that had only one minor victory to its name. The story and its two follow-up articles were a resounding blow to the dictator, making a mockery of his claims that Fidel was dead and that the Sierra Maestra was encased in a “ring of steel” through which no rebels, let alone middle-aged foreign journalists, might pass. Government censors tried to block the story within Cuba, cutting the piece by hand with scissors from every copy of the Times on sale. But the story had its own life and was smuggled onto the island. Movement supporters in New York made over 3,000 copies and mailed them to every address in the Havana social registry. Translations into Spanish were eagerly pored over and passed hand-to-hand from university halls to restaurant kitchens. (The only guerrillas who may have been less than thrilled were Raúl, who was dismissed as “slight and pleasant,” and Juan Almeida, whose name was misprinted as “Ameida” and was unflatteringly described as “a stocky Negro” with a “ready brilliant smile and a willingness for publicity.” The story was so widely read that a girl in a remote sierra village would later compliment Almeida on being more svelte than El Señor Matthews had reported).
Batista then managed to make himself look even more foolish when he ordered his minister of defense to denounce the article as a fabrication. Because no photo had been published showing Matthews and Fidel together, the meeting was merely “a chapter in a fantastic novel.” The next day the Times duly printed a shot from Matthews’s camera, showing Fidel lighting a cigar next to the journalist, who was poised in his black overcoat and newsboy cap, notebook in hand.
In one stroke Fidel and his fortunes had been resurrected. From now on he would be seen as a romantic hero, the Robin Hood of Cuba, while Batista was typecast as a lying buffoon. One New York magazine would later run a cartoon of Fidel with a caption taken from one of the newspaper’s most famous slogans: “I Got My Job Through the New York Times.” The ever-thoughtful Celia sent a thank-you note to Ruby Hart Phillips in a hand-woven basket lined with mountain moss and adorned with orchids.