MEANWHILE, IN THE Sierra Maestra, the guerrillas were living like desperate nomads. The small band may have become minor celebrities in the US, but in the months after the New York Times interview they were changing camp daily, usually after punishing twelve-hour hikes, and often only one step ahead of the army. They were also perilously short of supplies, going without food for days at a time. That the fragile revolt failed to be extinguished entirely was largely due to the efforts of the detail-oriented Celia, who after meeting Fidel threw herself into the task of funneling matériel from Manzanillo to the mountains. In the process, she became “the soul, heart and life of the rebellion,” as one of her admirers put it. Privately, Celia longed to be the Movement’s first female guerrilla, following in the footsteps of the heroic nineteenth-century Cuban women who had fought for independence, but she could see that her logistical talents behind the scenes were needed far more. The chicos in the sierra were full of passion and drive, but they were sorely lacking in organization.
Her top priority was to help increase the guerrillas’ sadly depleted numbers. Under orders from Frank, Celia overcame the resistance of macho Cuban males unaccustomed to taking orders from a woman and began creating a secret transit base for new recruits. (Many were M-26-7 agents who were quemado, “burned”—in other words—had their covers blown. Frank also insisted they should be “politically sophisticated.”) After a few days of location scouting, Celia stumbled on an unlikely piece of real estate: an abandoned plantation house outside Manzanillo within full view of a busy road and only a quarter mile from a military prison. Like Frank cruising in his flaming-red Dodge, this would be hiding in plain sight. (“Let the soldiers protect us,” she joked.) The key attraction was a morass of thorny trees—the same bristling marabú that had given Celia refuge when she was on the run from the police. Tall, dense, and hostile, the thicket offered splendid protection, and became known in the Movement as the marabuzal—which was also Cuban slang for “a convoluted mess.”
The marabuzal was soon converted into a barracks Tim Burton might have envisioned. Animal trails were widening into bristling tunnels and clearings into spiky “dorms.” By night bats swooped overhead, while a brown boa that could grow ten feet in length, the Majá de Santa María, writhed through the underbrush hunting rodents. No reveille call was ever needed, since hundreds of birds created a cacophony before dawn. Celia herself took up residence in the derelict plantation house nearby, stockpiling uniforms, tinned food, and medicine in her “central warehouse,” a drafty upstairs chamber. Like a haunted army surplus store, Celia’s stock was updated as the war developed. In one letter smuggled from the sierra, Raúl politely asked her to make sure any knapsacks she bought had straps at least two and a half inches wide, otherwise they would tear apart with the heavy loads, spilling bullets and food into the underbrush.
EXPERIENCING CELIA’S RECRUITING system was a surreal affair, as we can learn from the vivid recollections of Eloy Rodríguez. The fresh-faced nineteen-year-old M-26-7 activist was taking his rooster into a cockfighting ring one morning in early March when a friend tapped him on the shoulder and whispered: “Are you ready to go into the mountains?”
“You can count on me,” Eloy replied.
He clearly did not understand the urgency. The police were staking out Eloy’s home. He had to leave immediately.
Without saying good-bye to his family, Eloy signed a pledge of allegiance Frank had drafted for all new recruits and was bundled into a waiting car; only later would he learn that the cherubic, snappily dressed woman at the wheel was Vilma Espín, who calmly bluffed her way past a military checkpoint with her upper-class hauteur. (Vilma could often intimidate Cuban men; on one occasion, when her purse containing snapshots of herself and Fidel in the Sierra Maestra was seized by policemen, she shamed them into giving it back without opening it, saying it contained “intimate women’s things.”) None of the recruits were told where they were going until the last minute—a nerve-wracking adventure for the provincial boy Eloy, who had learned how to dynamite bridges and destroy electricity plants but had never been away from home.
Vilma deposited him at a house outside of Manzanillo, where—of all things—a noisy children’s party was underway. As sugar-charged seven-year-olds raced past, a housewife cheerfully presented him with a slice of cake. It was the home of Felipe Guerra Matos, Celia’s right-hand man, who hosted parties for his son, Pupi, as a cover for the comings and goings of M-26-7 recruits. As 1957 progressed, the lucky Pupi would sometimes have birthdays three or four times a week. It was “an endless fiesta,” Eloy discovered, “where the children, unaware of the dramatic situation they were covering up, delighted in gobbling down sweets and soda.”
After dark, Eloy and another volunteer were driven to the ghostly marabuzal, where Celia gave them tetanus and typhoid shots by the light of a kerosene lamp. She then lectured them on the difficult task ahead—“You are going to live the life of a vagrant; you have to prepare for the worst”—and left them to hang their hammocks in the dark. But the marabú thorns slashed their hands, and the pair decided to sleep on the hard ground. Eloy fought off homesickness, particularly when food arrived the next morning. At first he thought it was a practical joke when he received the daily ration of five spoonfuls of rice, two of picadillo (a ham and egg hash), and two slices of yucca. “That’s it,” the squad leader laughed. “In the sierra, you eat when you can.”
Slowly, the number of recruits increased until the thicket was crowded with hammocks. Fidel wanted to return his numbers to the magic eighty-two of the Granma. (The figure had such talismanic resonance that veterans of the landing would introduce themselves as “one of the eighty-two.”) But the schedule was pushed ahead by the DR’s ill-fated attack on the Presidential Palace on March 13, which prompted a burst of army repression all over Oriente. Two nights later, in the middle of a rainstorm, fifty-two men in hand-sewn uniforms with M-26-7 armbands and berets climbed into the backs of two trucks, which lumbered along unpaved back roads until mud slowed their progress to a standstill. Led by Guerra, the men stumbled along dark forest trails overnight until they were finally met by the enigmatic Argentine, Che Guevara. Che gave the new recruits his personal take on the “elementary guerrilla training” he had learned in Mexico. His first lesson—“The most important thing is to shoot them and don’t let them shoot at you”—got a big laugh. But the men’s high spirits were tempered by the grueling ten-day march that followed, and dashed entirely when they finally met the celebrated Fidel and his main force. The New York Times story had led the volunteers to expect a robust army of hundreds, but they found less than twenty guerrillas, all of whom were a sorry sight. “These men had long hair, beards, ripped uniforms, a sack for a backpack,” recalled Eloy. “It was a deplorable situation . . . We saw them and our hearts sank to our feet.” Even worse, Fidel informed them in his welcome speech that the war might last “five, ten, fifteen, twenty years.” Most of them had thought they were signing up for twelve months.
Fidel’s veterans were just as unimpressed by the greenhorns. Barely half of the fifty-two recruits had weapons. Their knapsacks were weighed down with “useless” items like towels, and they complained constantly about the discomforts of sierra life. Many even rejected their one daily meal as unpalatable; particularly despised was one of the culinary staples in the mountains, boiled green banana tossed with butter and salt. In his diary, Raúl noted with dry humor that they had also arrived just as “a novelty was added to our guerrilla lives—flea infestations.” For the new men, the evening ritual became to take off their clothes and pick for vermin. Still the fleas were not as bad as the macagüeras, Raúl thought, flies whose bites would get infected when scratched.
CHE AND JUAN Almeida were impatient to keep up the momentum after the victory at La Plata, and urged another raid; the Sierra Maestra had become so quiet that an army colonel in mid-April told the New York Times that the guerrillas had given up the fight. But Fidel felt that the new recruits were still too raw. At this stage, the aim of the Rebel Army (as the men now called it, capitalizing the title) was still simple survival, and with the increase in numbers, food shortages had become critical. The coming weeks would be recalled as the days of vacas flacas, “lean cows,” a biblical reference to a period of want from the story of Joseph and the pharaoh.
Prized provisions were traded like currency: yucca for sweet potato, chocolate for cigarettes, milk for sardines. Fluctuations in supply could alter the exchange rate. The truly famished might swap an expensive cigar for a single banana skin, which was then sautéed and devoured. The officers and men shared the same rations, which consolidated morale, although the gourmand Fidel flew into a rage when he returned from the field late one night and found the rice and beans he had been expecting for dinner had been eaten. On another occasion he refused a meal because it was poorly cooked, retiring to his hammock, Che noted, “with an air of offended majesty.” Fidel begged Celia to send more palatable supplies, “especially the packets of cream-of-pea soup with ham. Each one makes four cups of thick, delicious soup; I received only six packets, we need large quantities.”
Training the volunteers progressed slowly. As the column trudged onward, guns would go off accidentally, ammunition was lost, arguments began. Che’s biographer Jon Lee Anderson compares the Rebel Army’s progress to “an episode in a Keystone cops movie.” Che was harshly critical of the new men, but he had his own embarrassments. On one occasion he went on a solo night mission to buy three chickens from a farm and became lost for twenty-four hours. In fact, the spring months of 1957 were for Che “the bitter days,” he later wrote. His asthma was aggravated by the lint of hammocks stitched from burlap sacks. He was forced to sleep on the ground, which only made him sicker, until Fidel gave him an upgrade to a high-quality canvas version.
Che’s physical condition improved considerably when a rural herbalist supplied him with a local remedy: dried sweet-pea leaf, which opened the lungs when smoked. Many in the rebels’ orbit were also marijuana farmers, including a favorite guide named Molinero. The drug had long been part of the sierra’s underground economy, although there is no evidence that the guerrillas partook.
IN LATE MARCH the rebels welcomed some memorable recruits: three teenage Americans who had run away from home to bear arms for the revolution. Chuck Ryan, age nineteen, was the oldest and cockiest. The first time he encountered the ramshackle guerrilla force, he walked up to Fidel and asked point-blank in English: “Where’s the army?” The exotic trio were all rebellious sons of naval officers at the US base in Guantánamo Bay. The Massachusetts-born Ryan qualified as an elder statesman; the others were Mike Garvey, a fifteen-year-old Brooklynite who styled his hair in an Elvis Presley pompadour, and Vic Buehlman, described as “a tall husky youth,” age seventeen and raised in Virginia. These younger two still attended high school at “Gitmo.” They had first heard stories about M-26-7 from Cuban girls while hanging around a beachfront brothel for GIs and became caught up in the adventure. Their first modest act of support was to buy arms from Guantánamo’s sports store and smuggle them out of the base in barrels of flour. When they read in the Times article that Fidel was gathering reinforcements, they ran away to join up without leaving farewell letters for their parents. (As Garvey later recalled, “We just went off base and we didn’t come back. I didn’t give a damn.”)
Frank and Celia immediately realized the media value of the gringo teens. They were given special treatment in Manzanillo, hosted in a comfortable house, and even permitted to make friends with local youngsters until front-page “missing” photos in local newspapers prompted Celia to have them smuggled into the sierra. When they met, Fidel was unfazed by Chuck’s blunt question about his ragtag brigade. “He said, ‘This is it,’” Ryan recalled. “‘We are all people dedicated to the principle of liberty or death.’” That was good enough for the boys, who were quickly won over by the leader’s charm and passion: “He was . . . a revolutionary trying to overthrow an evil dictator. That’s what it was all about for me. Good versus evil.”
Within days Fidel sent off a promotional package to the New York Times. It included a snapshot of the wholesome, all-American youths, wearing their M-26-7 uniforms and berets, and cradling their guns with toothy smiles. An open letter (supposedly from the boys but probably in part dictated by Fidel) asked President Eisenhower not to revoke their US citizenship for joining a foreign army. It included a stilted “special oath”: “I am inspired in the same ideals of liberty and democracy that drove the founders of the United States of America to declare their independence on July 4, 1776.” This was the same “cause of liberty,” the letter pointedly added, that Eisenhower himself had championed in command of the Allied armies in Europe “against the tyranny of the Nazifascist [sic] Axis.” The oath devoutly concluded: “Acting like this, I will serve the destiny of Cuba, America and the world. So help me God.”
Over the coming weeks, the Navy brats were popular enough with everyone in the Rebel Army but the medic Che, who felt he was wasting time on “their many maladies.” According to Ryan, Fidel would tease them about the aloof Argentine, saying “Muy malo. Muy malo. Communista!” They mostly stood guard duty, since the gringo kids were too valuable to lose. After the Times ran a story on them, their presence piqued the interest of many in the US, including the CBS TV editors in New York. Print journalism was already becoming passé in 1957; the “new medium” of television was the way of the future, and Fidel would prove to be a natural.