HERBERT L. MATTHEWS was far from the only reporter in Manhattan who sympathized with the underdog; CBS in particular was filled with progressive correspondents drawn to Fidel’s cause. The presence of the three American runaways was just the news hook that a roguish television newsman named Robert Taber needed to convince his superiors to send him and a cameraman into the Sierra Maestra. With the cumbersome video equipment, it would be a far more ambitious expedition than Matthews had undertaken, and potentially more dangerous; weeks earlier, two NBC journalists from Birmingham, Alabama, posing as geologists had been arrested by the Cuban military and only released when the US embassy intervened. But M-26-7 was now committed to getting Fidel on the air. The potential PR benefit was enormous: CBS TV was able to reach more than 60 million people with each broadcast, and its radio division at least as many more.
OF THE MANY yanqui romantics attracted to Cuba’s cause, the wiry thirty-seven-year-old Taber had the most swashbuckling biography. A tough Chicago kid who had been in and out of reform school, Taber ran away from home as a teenager, riding the rails and taking part in a string of armed robberies in Cleveland. He spent several years in the Ohio state penitentiary and was paroled to serve in the merchant marines during the Second World War—all before he had turned twenty. As a grown-up juvenile delinquent, Taber moved to New York and landed on a career as a freelance journalist as the best way to avoid boredom, working for Newsday, the Brooklyn Eagle, and the Long Island Star Journal. He became a war correspondent for CBS in the early 1950s, and made a name for himself covering post-colonial conflicts in French Africa while living in a luxury hotel in Casablanca with his wife, an elegant Manhattan model, and young son. Taber became disillusioned with the US while reporting on the 1954 coup in Guatemala, where he watched jets roaring over the capital’s main plaza with American markings on their wings. Washington’s brazen support for the overthrow of a democratically elected government defied the country’s noblest ideals, he felt, an echo of the McCarthyism that had wreaked havoc among his friends back home.
For Taber, the idea of filming the idealistic Fidel was irresistible. In mid-April he flew to Havana with cameraman Wendell Hoffman—a strapping, six-foot-four-inch farm boy from Kansas who had taught himself the cutting-edge technology of video. There was no chance of sneaking their 150 pounds of gear through Cuban immigration, so they declared to airport officials that they were two Presbyterian missionaries doing a documentary on the island’s rural faithful. Haydée Santamaría met them with a driver and accompanied them on the sixteen-hour overnight trip to the Oriente, this time in a car that had been specially refitted to hide the camera equipment under the broad leather seats. In Manzanillo they met Celia and loaded the bulky Auricon camera and tripod onto a mule; the newsmen lugged the other equipment on their backs. The group of six, including Haydée, Celia, and two armed male compañeros, then trekked 150 miles by night into the heart of the sierra.
A few days later, word reached Fidel that the army had surrounded the farmhouse where the American journalists were resting, and Camilo was dispatched with a platoon to rescue them “at all costs.” The guerrillas ran along trails and riverbeds for almost seven hours straight, but it turned out to be a false alarm. When Haydée spotted the rebels approaching through the trees, she was convinced they were enemy soldiers until they saw Camilo’s flashing smile. “Camilo had marvelous teeth,” Yeyé recalled. “I don’t remember anything else.”
ON THE SAME day Celia brought Taber into Fidel’s camp, she realized her dream of becoming a guerrilla. Fidel formally inducted her into the Rebel Army. From now on she could march and fight by his side. (Haydée, her feet oozing blood and suffering from asthma, was more of a city girl). The guerrillas were stunned to learn that a woman intended to join them full-time. They were still trudging for ten to twelve hours a day through the jungle and changing camp almost daily. Celia was rake-thin and elegantly coiffed; many rebels assumed that in the long term she would live in a village with a campesino family. (As one recalled: “We couldn’t imagine someone as fragile as her being able to stand such a hard life.”) But she didn’t flinch. Over time, the men were relieved to find that Celia moved among them effortlessly. They also noticed that her presence improved Fidel’s mood: as he basked in the attention, his mood swings became less extreme.
Celia now threw her planning skills, polished by decades of caring for her father, into looking after Fidel. On the surface, her role appeared domestic. She would get up at 5:00 a.m. to prepare his coffee. She mended his clothes and ensured they were clean. She repaired his boots and confirmed that new spectacles were always on order in case he threw a fit, and that good cigars were on hand. She would organize his correspondence and appointments, and would only retire at night when Fidel was ready for bed. But Celia was far more than an aide, secretary, and lover. She discussed every detail of the war with Fidel, and very quickly became his closest confidante and advisor. It was an early triumph for women’s liberation in Cuba. The strutting male guerrillas quickly began to recognize Celia’s peculiar genius and deal with her directly on a range of daily issues. Her orders were on a par with Fidel’s. For his part, Fidel believed that Celia’s feminine presence and small acts of thoughtfulness made the men dress and behave better; it also cut down on their swearing.
BY THE TIME the CBS journalists arrived, Fidel had achieved his goal of commanding eighty-two men, even if most of them were urbanites who still found wilderness life a struggle. He instructed them on how to behave on camera for Taber and Hoffman and, after the first day of filming, celebrated by giving out an extra ration of condensed milk, the guerrilla equivalent of the British Royal Navy’s prized tot of rum. Fidel decided that they should conduct the key interview with him at the summit of Pico Turquino, Cuba’s highest mountain, in front of the bust of José Martí that Celia and her father had lugged up there in 1953. It was a strenuous climb, with a wheezing Che the last to summit, but it offered postcard-perfect coastal views. The ever-curious Fidel measured the peak’s height with his altimeter, clocking it at over 6,500 feet.
Hoffman left soon after with the videotape, burying his camera by the side of a road for safekeeping so he would draw no unwelcome attention at the airport. Taber stayed on in the sierra to shoot still photos for Life magazine. When he did depart, Fidel asked Taber to take home the youngest two American runaways, who were healthy but emaciated. It would put a serious dent in US sympathy for the revolution if either was injured, Fidel felt. The guerrillas gave the teens a rousing send-off, singing the Cuban national anthem and breaking into applause. Che was less sentimental. He felt the young gringos “simply could not stand the rigors of our campaign.” (“We felt a sort of affection for them,” he sniffed, “but in the end we were glad to see them go.”)
From Guantánamo, the two boys were promptly shipped back to the US to resume their high school studies. Before they left, Camilo had asked them to visit his wife in San Francisco—which Buehlman eventually did, without telling his parents.
AT 6:00 P.M. on Sunday, May 19, Taber’s thirty-minute documentary Rebels of the Sierra Maestra hit American airwaves. Publicity stills of shouting guerrillas raising their rifles had whipped up interest for weeks beforehand; in New York, a crowd of six hundred Cuban supporters gathered to watch the special in a midtown hotel, while ex-president Prío was given a private preview in Miami. The show was also seen on Cuban televisions—the island had the second highest per capita ownership of TVs in the world, after the US—and, taking advantage of a rare lapse in censorship, was transcribed in Bohemia magazine soon after. The issue became so popular that it had to be reprinted, and eventually reached around 1 million Cubans, about one-fifth of the population.
The documentary was so positive towards Fidel that he might as well have directed it himself. It vividly conveyed the difficulties of sierra life and the guerrillas’ youthful idealism, culminating in the scene filmed on Pico Turquino where the men burst into patriotic song together. The result crystallized for tens of millions of viewers the image of Fidel as Latin America’s Rebel with a Cause. Taber’s son Peter recalls basking in reflected glory at his Manhattan elementary school the next morning: “I was in the fourth grade and half the kids in class had seen it,” he said. “They were in awe.”
The Rebel Army now seemed more real in the media than it did on the ground. Fidel decided it was finally time to end the weeks of inactivity. A large shipment of arms had landed by boat on the coast of Oriente, many rescued from DR caches in Havana. The treasure trove included three tripod-mounted machine guns, nineteen semiautomatic M1 Garand rifles (the standard US Army issue in World War Two and Korea, named after its designer), and 6,000 bullets—enough to equip most of the Rebel Army’s now 136 men. Celia claimed one of the new rifles, to the envy of some male combatants. Che was given a submachine gun. Although he had always carried a rifle, this officially elevated him from his background role as medic to a frontline fighter.
Fidel offered the latest batch of volunteers one last chance to go home—nine did so—then started marching with 127 men. The resulting battle, Che would later write, would have “the greatest psychological impact in the entire history of the war.”