The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.
—SELECTED MILITARY WRITINGS OF MAO TSE-TUNG
BEFORE DAWN ON May 28, teams of guerrillas crept through a ghostly sea mist near the remote fishing village of El Uvero, weaving past a darkened lumber yard to encircle a fortified army barracks. Inside, guarded by four sentry posts, some sixty soldiers were sleeping to the steady rumble of the distant surf. It was a far larger enemy force than the Rebel Army had ever faced; even though they outnumbered the military two to one and had the element of surprise on their side, the guerrillas’ almost complete lack of experience made it an agonizing moment. Fidel was stationed on a steep hill above the village, Celia by his side, squinting through his rifle’s telescopic sights and trying to identify the telegraph equipment in the main building. He needed to knock out communications with the first shots so the soldiers could not call for reinforcements.
The barracks had only one open window, which Fidel deduced was to ventilate the telegraph set. He squeezed off the first rounds at 5:15 a.m., which found their mark, knocked out the machine, and signaled to his men to start their attack. Unfortunately, he had fired several minutes too soon. The guerrilla platoons down below had not reached their positions, and it was still too dark and misty to see. But suddenly, they could identify their targets from the flashes from the barracks as the sixty panicked troops started shooting blindly at them in the darkness.
What Fidel had planned as a hit-and-run surprise attack ended up being a bloody pitched battle. The guerrillas perforated the main army structures and sentry posts with barrages of gunfire and made several attempts to seize them, without success. These assaults were led by Che with a bewildering indifference to his own safety. He remained unscathed, but soon a steady stream of rebel wounded was limping to the rear. Juan Almeida was hit in several places. One near-lethal bullet was deflected by a metal spoon Almeida was carrying in his chest pocket; another hit a can of condensed milk in his trousers, whose contents soon oozed white and red. Up on the hill above, a man kneeling near Fidel and Celia, Julio Díaz, was hit in the eye and killed instantly. The young American Chuck Ryan, meanwhile, dodged bullets in Raúl’s platoon.
By the time full daylight arrived at 7:30 a.m., the soldiers were still holding out. The commanding officer hoped the guerrillas would either run out of ammunition or the gunfire would be spotted by a passing aircraft. But when he peeked from his hiding spot to assess the situation, he was shot in the head. A few minutes later the second in command took a white handkerchief from the dead officer’s trousers and waved it in surrender.
The barracks buildings had been turned into sieves; in fact, they were so saturated with gunfire that five of the soldiers’ seven pet parrots had been killed in their cages. It was a costly victory. A half dozen rebels and fourteen soldiers were dead, with thirty-five wounded on both sides. Che had to suddenly step back from his role as fighter to field surgeon, a transition made, he said, by simply washing his hands. Military patrols could now arrive at any time, so the guerrillas loaded their wounded into commandeered trucks, together with fourteen unhurt army prisoners. The other rebels clung to the sides of the moving vehicles any way they could; the hoods became so crowded, the drivers could barely see the road ahead. The convoy took a turnoff into the forest and set up an improvised hospital camp only one hundred yards from the main highway. The six rebel dead were buried in a clearing nearby.
Two critically wounded guerrillas had to be left behind at El Uvero, even though the military might summarily execute the pair. A young man named Cilleros had a bullet pass through his lungs before embedding itself in his spine, leaving his legs paralyzed. “He knew it was the end,” Che wrote. “We knew it too.” But they all put on a brave face as they said farewell. Che kissed him on the forehead and told him all would be well, since “we didn’t want to make his last moments more bitter.” Cilleros died of his injuries soon after, but the other man, Leal, who had a serious head wound, was protected by an officer who had been cared for by Che and testified to the rebels’ decent behavior. Leal eventually recovered and spent the rest of the war in prison.
TODAY, A MONUMENT with a gilded rifle marks Fidel’s lookout above El Uvero, offering breathtaking Caribbean views. It celebrates the rebels’ first taste of genuine combat. “This was the victory that marked our coming of age,” Che later wrote. “From this battle on, our morale grew tremendously.” For weeks afterward participants recounted to one another the details of the firefight, exaggerating their own experiences. “We had learned how to be invincible,” Fidel crowed. “We had learned how to win!” Despite renewed censorship, word of the victory caused a sensation when it leaked out in Cuba. The New York Times reported with pride that the teenage gringo, Chuck Ryan, had “fought bravely and well, and now is accepted as a full-fledged soldier in the rebel forces.”
Two days after the battle the army prisoners were released after signing a statement attesting to their good treatment. (The guerrillas had even shared their paltry food rations.) Showing mercy to captives had become a central tenet of the guerrilla war. In time, it would have a corrosive effect on enemy morale. When released soldiers returned to their units, they encouraged others to throw down their arms rather than risk injury or death.
Most of the rebels now began hiking back into the sierra, but twenty wounded men, including Juan Almeida, were forced to stay behind under Che’s command. El Uvero proved to be a watershed for the Argentine even more than for the rest of the army. Not only had he displayed near-suicidal bravery, the aftermath showcased his leadership skills. Keeping the rebel wounded safe was a hair-raising feat. The men had to keep moving to avoid patrols, camping wherever they could in damp caves and chicken coops, and foraging for food as they went. One man had to be carried on a makeshift stretcher created from hammocks strung beneath a palm branch. It took a full month to nurse the wounded and transport them to safety. By the time they met Fidel’s main group, Che’s charges were as ragged as castaways, but not a single man had been lost.
From then on Che’s confidence increased. He shed his “foreigner’s complex,” as he called it—the feeling that he should defer to Cubans on all issues of politics and strategy—and his bond with Fidel became more intense. They were both intellectuals, with a vast depth of reading at their command, and would spend hours at night arguing about history, literature, and politics as the more left-wing Che tried to convince Fidel of the virtues of Marxism.
At last, two months later, on July 22, Fidel acknowledged Che’s new stature by promoting him, although he did it in a casual, almost offhand way. The guerrillas were all signing a letter of support for Frank País and Celia, who had been forced to return temporarily to the lowlands to help the increasingly harried Movement leaders. When Che was about to add his name, Fidel told him, “Put ‘Comandante.’” Che was taken aback. This was the highest rank in the Rebel Army, giving him a status just below Fidel himself; it also meant he was leapfrogging above Juan Almeida, his former superior. In a slightly more ceremonious gesture, Fidel presented him with a small golden star to pin to his forage cap. “There is a little bit of vanity hiding somewhere within every one of us,” Che wrote. “It made me feel like the proudest man on earth that day.” Almeida, meanwhile, struggled with a pang of jealousy at having been passed over, since he had been with Fidel much longer. “I said to myself, ‘I would have liked that,’” he wrote in his diary, with disarming honesty. “‘But there you go.’ I understood it perfectly. I gave [Che] a powerful hug and we said good-bye.”
FOR THE ARMY, the defeat at El Uvero was a far more serious psychological blow than La Plata. Its commanders were forced to admit that isolated military posts could not be defended; over the coming weeks, many were closed down, starting a withdrawal from the sierra that would accelerate over time. The new tactic would be to indiscriminately bombard the mountains from the air with B-26s, sometimes using the newfangled incendiary agent purchased in bulk from the US, napalm. Whole villages were wiped out in attacks that observers would compare to small-scale Guernicas, but the raids did little to hurt the guerrillas: in the jungle, trees and mud would absorb the impact of high explosives and limit their effect to twenty-five to fifty yards.
The offhand cruelty of the Rural Guard did not relent. On one occasion the guerrillas found the mutilated corpse of Guillermo Domínguez, a twenty-five-year-old Cuban photographer who had been captured by an army patrol in early May. He had been beaten, stripped, and had his hands tied with his belt; the soldiers then bayoneted him and let him squirm for a while before blowing off his head. On another occasion the rebels went in search of a foul smell near their camp and came across the bloated body of a campesino. They were horrified to recognize him as Ángel el Cojo, a farmer who had lavished food on them in April; he too had been kidnapped and tortured to death.
Not long after, an attempt to emulate the Granma expedition ended in tragedy. Twenty-seven would-be guerrillas from a Cuban exile group in Florida landed on a desolate beach in the Oriente in a boat called the Corinthia. The force was quickly betrayed by villagers and intercepted by the army. A mass execution followed. Only one man escaped and, with nowhere else to hide, joined Fidel in the sierra.
FOR THE URBAN cadres of M-26-7, news of the victory at El Uvero provoked euphoria tinged with envy. For all its discomforts, guerrilla life felt oddly peaceful to the city-based revolutionaries who had visited the Sierra Maestra. The jungle was cold, damp, and infested with bugs, but there was a clear-cut division between friends and enemies. There were even moments of security and calm when the hammocks were stretched out at camp after dark. Cuban cities, by contrast, had become murky worlds of spies, sudden shoot-outs, and midnight police raids that make John le Carré’s postwar Berlin seem tame. There was no respite: the nights of a clandestino, Haydée said, were passed in a state of “constant tension . . . You always had to sleep with your eyes open.” This was particularly true in Santiago, which was slowly degenerating into a war zone—one reason why the guerrillas had sent their letter of support to Celia and Frank.
Army checkpoints on street corners were piled with sandbags and barbed wire, and backed up by armored cars mounted with machine guns. Violence could erupt out of nowhere. Gunfights scattered the customers of outdoor bars. Pedestrians would be seized on the sidewalk and bundled into unmarked cars. By night, police vehicles trawled the streets with floodlights, looking for saboteurs. SIM raids would be followed by the sound of mothers shrieking as young men were herded into the backs of trucks. Women wandered the city’s prisons asking after missing husbands and sons. On one occasion, a fourteen-year-old was picked up and executed for putting a firecracker in a milk bottle, which somehow was taken to be a Molotov cocktail.
Disgust with Batista seeped through every social class in the Oriente. A network of middle-class business owners called the Civic Resistance—accountants, butchers, grocers—donated cash, distributed leaflets, and provided safe houses. Pistols would be dropped at bread shops, hidden inside bags of bread rolls. Housewives would transfer ammunition in their children’s dolls. The city was honeycombed with caches of arms. Vilma wrote that she used “false walls, false floors, basements, holes, gardens, backyards, special furniture, water tanks, cisterns, vaults, warehouses, hospitals, pharmacies, stores, schools and recreation centers.”
This civilian support was crucial for the Movement in Santiago. An agent fleeing the police might dash into a tailor’s shop, where the owner would throw a jacket over his shoulders and pretend they were in the middle of a fitting. Families took to leaving their doors open for fugitives. When dodging patrols, Haydée recalled how she would casually slip into someone’s house, sit down, and ask for a coffee as if nothing were out of the ordinary. When the coast was clear, she would just as casually get up and say, “Well, see you later, thanks!”
Even on the most tense occasions, the Cuban sense of humor could shine through. Santiagueños liked to joke that the only businesses thriving in the city were funeral parlors, travel agencies, and the national lottery, since residents were either being killed, leaving town, or desperately gambling for money to flee. Vilma once escaped a night raid at Haydée’s apartment by grabbing sensitive documents and jumping from the rear balcony in her nightgown. Her wild wet hair and getup surprised the neighbors, who joked that the Holy Virgin had dropped down from heaven. Later they suggested Vilma should wear a hairnet the next time she was out on the town. “When something didn’t end in violence, it ended in laughter,” Vilma recalled.
The Civic Resistance became so popular that it became the basis for an agreement Frank brokered with Fidel and moderate politicians in mid-July, promising that after Batista’s defeat, Fidel would hold democratic elections within a year. This so-called Sierra Maestra Manifesto was instrumental in further broadening support for the rebellion, with all sorts of religious and social groups warming to M-26-7, including Rotarians, medical associations, theater groups—even garden clubs.
DESPITE THE UNREST, Santiago’s venerated Carnival went ahead in high summer, and even encouraged a touch of revolutionary whimsy. To celebrate the fourth anniversary of the Moncada on July 26, Celia and her friend Elsa inflated balloons marked M-26-7 and floated them off a rooftop to land in front of the Manzanillo police station. But grim reality reasserted itself soon enough.
On July 30, one of Vilma’s telephone operators listened in on a disturbing call to the police station: “Listen, Chief, those 3,000 pesos you promised me?” one officer said. “Okay, I’m ready to collect.” Another voice added: “We got him, that filthy———. It’s done, we put a bullet through him.” It was the first news that Frank País had been assassinated for a $3,000 bounty.
The linen-suited charmer Frank had been arrested earlier in 1957 but released, since his pivotal role in M-26-7 had somehow remained secret. But by July, he was being hounded by SIM so intensely that he was forced to change safe houses almost nightly. It was even too dangerous to meet with his mother or girlfriend. (The women arranged to stand on a distant street corner so he could at least see them with a spyglass.) Frank’s sense of isolation was radically increased when his twenty-year-old brother Josué was killed in a shoot-out with police. No young males dared attend the funeral; elderly women made up the majority of mourners. Still, they were a feisty bunch: when a suspected informer arrived, they hammered him with their high heels.
Exhausted and depressed, Frank began to behave erratically. On the night of July 29 he moved into a house he had long avoided because it had only one exit. The next afternoon Frank received an urgent call: the military were cordoning off the neighborhood and were searching door to door. What happened next was pieced together from eyewitnesses. He and the house owner, Raúl Pujol, dashed out into the street, thinking it would be safer to blend into the crowd. But one of Frank’s former classmates was riding in an unmarked police car and identified him. Frank and Pujol were stopped, pummeled with rifle butts, and thrown into the back seat of the vehicle. After roaring a few blocks away to an alley, both men were tossed onto the sidewalk and shot in the back of the neck. País was twenty-three years old.
Within minutes a crowd had descended on the murder site, and as the news spread, Santiago fell into a state of shock. When the police released the corpses from the morgue, Frank’s mother examined the bullet wounds and cried out: “My son was a teacher, not a gangster!” In tropical Cuba, burials are conducted quickly, and the funerals were scheduled for the next day. Frank’s body was lovingly dressed in an olive-green guerrilla uniform and black tie, and laid in state, where mourners remarked on his “saintly” serenity. The funeral procession was followed by 60,000 people with emotional scenes that evoke the cortège of JFK. Crowds threw flowers from the balconies, and chanted “Death to Batista and his regime!” and “¡Viva Fidel!” Businesses closed in a spontaneous protest. Bank tellers walked off the job, cinemas were shut, bus drivers abandoned their vehicles by the sides of the roadways. Even the shoe shiners’ chairs were empty.
The police left the burial alone, but other political gatherings in Santiago were ruthlessly repressed. By chance, the new US ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith, arrived in the city that same day on his first official visit. He and his wife were greeted by mothers in black weeds who were holding placards demanding an end to US support of Batista. The Americans were appalled when firemen turned hoses on the women and riot police dragged them into wagons. Smith held a press conference to express his disapproval of the “excessive” force and ask that the arrested women be released. (They were.) Frank’s funeral service was still going on that afternoon when the ambassador placed a wreath at the tomb of José Martí. It was a subtle act—Smith was hardly a radical—but the first sign that the US might be rethinking its attitude to the brutish Batista.
The members of M-26-7 would be haunted forever by the murder of the handsome young leader, who had been on a par with Fidel in the hierarchy and had a more astute grasp of national politics. The treacherous classmate who had identified Frank, Luis Mariano Randich, was quickly found and executed by an M-26-7 agent, but that did little to fill the void he left. Vilma realized that she had spoken calmly by phone with Frank only ten minutes before his death; he had given no indication that he was in danger. Celia was horrified to later receive a letter that Frank had posted the morning he died. In the sierra the guerrillas heard the news on Fidel’s transistor radio. The sense of loss was visceral, even among those who had met Frank only once.
For Fidel, Frank’s death left both a personal and organizational void. “What monsters!” he railed in a letter to Celia. “They have no idea of the intelligence, the character, the integrity of the person they murdered.” He withdrew to himself for a night of uncharacteristic silence. (“Fidel is in a bad way,” Juan Almeida noted in his diary. “The news hit him hard. I’ve never seen him like this.”) The Movement was now rudderless in the cities of Oriente. Celia, who was still in Manzanillo on her supposedly short visit, was obliged to stay on to help.
Within the space of a few months, the two most charismatic resistance figures besides Fidel—Frank País and José Echeverría—had been killed. But the presence of a few guerrillas in the mountains still seemed to most observers an insignificant threat. Batista appeared as secure as ever.