THE REBEL ARMY had swelled to two hundred men by midsummer, organized into a half dozen platoons in separate camps. Since the victory at El Uvero, the guerrillas were feeling increasingly at home in the Sierra Maestra, and they began to carve out an area of control they dubbed El Territorio Libre, “the Free Zone.” Although they continued to move camp nightly, the rebels created the embryo of an infrastructure, with permanent huts as refuges and caches of tinned food and ammunition buried at strategic points. They soon set up their own bakery, a field hospital, and even a “bomb factory” where they manufactured land mines and grenades using TNT from unexploded airplane shells with shards of condensed-milk tins as shrapnel. The ever-inventive Fidel took a hands-on role: working with a captured lathe, he designed a makeshift mortar, then tried to develop “a kind of bazooka” with projectiles crafted from corrugated iron.
The guerrillas also became more integrated into sierra society. Eutimio’s betrayal in February had shaken their confidence in the guajiros, but it soon became obvious that he was an exception, as the mountain communities supplied them with consistent support, often at great peril. As Fidel wrote: “The word ‘people,’ that has been pronounced so many times with such a vague and confused sense, has become a living reality here, a marvelous thing. Now at last, I know what ‘the people’ is.”
In turn, the Rebel Army became more trusted. In stark contrast to the Rural Guards, who left a trail of executed farmers and torched houses, the guerrillas maintained a respectful code of conduct. They religiously paid for food—Fidel would overpay rather than bargain—while Batista’s soldiers simply confiscated whatever they wanted. Their strict respect for local women struck a deep chord. And every time they eliminated a murderous overseer (often leaving a hand-painted sign that read EXECUTED FOR BETRAYING THE PEOPLE—M-26-7), their popularity grew. At one stage the guerrillas even put aside their guns and helped with the coffee harvest.
Instead of inducing fear and suspicion, the rebels were now embraced. The American photojournalist Andrew St. George hiked into the sierra on assignment for Look magazine, and his stories are a vivid source for this period. He added cinematic detail to Fidel’s image as a Caribbean Robin Hood, writing that wherever the guerrilla leader wandered, peasants would pop out of the bushes “dangling the gift of a hen, even a poem. He talks endlessly to them about their crops, their health, their families.” Like a politician on the stump, Fidel took the time to explain the revolution’s goals, ask about the campesinos’ hardships, and win each individual over.
The army’s price for betraying Fidel varied wildly: one peasant said he had been offered a mere $300 and two cows, a far cry from the $10,000 Eutimio was promised. Later in the summer Batista upped the ante considerably, putting an official reward of $100,000 on Fidel’s head. But as 1957 progressed, it became increasingly unlikely that there would be any takers. After a rebel platoon captured one remote army outpost in Bueycito, villagers even emerged to celebrate with them in the streets, with cold beer and sodas donated by the local bodega owner.
The near-famine days of spring faded as the campesinos secured the guerrillas’ supply lines, with one muleteer gaining the nickname “the Food King” for his ability to deliver tinned goods. Each of the six rebel platoons chose a cook who could work with the limited range of ingredients. The creative culinary solutions now included stews made of horsemeat, with leftovers salted and turned into tasajo, a version of jerky; when rehydrated, it had a texture similar to corned beef. Guerrillas from the cities found horse “exquisite,” Che claimed, but peasant volunteers were mortified. For farmers, the very idea of devouring a working farm animal was a crime: it was as if they were “committing an act of cannibalism while chewing the old friend of man.” They would have their revenge when they taught the city slickers to eat a sierra delicacy, snake. The boa often ended up on campesino tables in lean times. (The recipe: Cut off the head four inches from the neck, then hang the snake by its tail from a branch to drain the blood. Skin and gut. Chopped into six-inch pieces, the flesh can be roasted on sticks over an open fire or fried. The result was tough, sinewy, and full of tiny bones, but not without flavor and a good source of protein. True gourmands would bread the snake chunks with flour first, but this was a luxury rarely enjoyed in the mountains.) Camilo, who loved practical jokes, would offer nervous new recruits pieces of snake cooked up on his little gas burner, telling them it was “cat meat” to see their horrified reactions.
The only staple that never ran out was coffee, which was available in every hut, although percolation could be basic, with the grains strained through a spare sock.
In the remotest camps, fireside meals might be accompanied by music from a transistor radio or the quiet strumming of a guitar. Even small fiestas were not unknown. After midnight on August 12, a few veterans of the early struggle—Juan Almeida, Universo Sánchez, and Guillermo García—came to toast Fidel on his thirty-first birthday with a bottle of brandy.
NEW RECRUITS DRIFTED in from all over Cuba, including intrepid women, mostly still M-26-7 agents whose lives had become too “hot.” A routine was developed for fresh arrivals: They would be interrogated to make sure they were not spies, given some cash to send to their families, and provided a several hours of “political training.” After a couple of days, they would also be offered a chance to go home. By then, any illusions about guerrilla life had been crushed out of them by endless hikes and sodden conditions: summer was slightly warmer in the Sierra Maestra but it was also the rainy season. Even dry nights remained surprisingly frigid and sometimes so dark that the guerrillas had to use glowing coals to find their way. Trying to relieve himself one evening, Juan Almeida lit a match but fell down a fifteen-foot cliff, nearly killing himself; he spent several days recovering.
There were also more organized attempts at reinforcement. Celia dispatched a second group of eighty-eight men from the Oriente via her thorny transit camp, the marabuzal, including a nephew of one of Batista’s ministers and an ex‒army officer. They turned out to be far less disciplined than the first. En route, they devoured their rations, argued among themselves, and got lost. They lightened their forty-pound packs by tossing supplies in the bushes, including half-finished tins of milk and even, inexcusably, ammunition. (“That is monstrous!” Fidel wrote when he found out.) Only twenty had guns, and they were terrified of a surprise army attack. After two weeks the portly old peasant leader Crescencio Pérez managed to track down the sixty-six who were left—the others had deserted—and straighten them out, but the mishaps continued. No sooner had they reached Fidel’s camp than the ex‒army officer accidentally shot off his gun, forcing the entire group to relocate. Many were suspicious that he was an undercover agent, and the man would have been executed, Che said, if it was not for his genuine look of “surprise and consternation.” (The firearm accidents continued, until the inevitable tragedy occurred in late summer when an eighteen-year-old named Enrique Somohano shot himself while cleaning his rifle. The bullet passed through his lung and, despite quick medical attention, he died the same day.)
To whip them into shape, Fidel took the new recruits to climb Pico Turquino; at the majestic summit the excited first-timers engraved graffiti on the base of the José Martí statue. With his supernatural energy, the comandante en jefe developed a personal relationship with each volunteer and spent every waking minute asking his men’s opinions on every little matter. (“How do you feel? Did you sleep well? How was the food last night?”) At the end of any day’s march, no matter how exhausting, he gave a speech analyzing the landscape they had traversed and explaining his strategy.
As the camaraderie of the Rebel Army grew, members took the Cuban love of nicknames to extremes. Some were simply diminutives, reflecting the affectionate Latin habit of adding -ito to virtually every moniker—Carlito, Juanito, Guerrita, and so on. Others were more original. The guerrillas soon included Lalo and Yayo, Pepe and Paco, Chichí, Chicho, Chuchó, and Chino. There was Sabú, Vilo, Nano, Nandín, Kiko—Tano, Titín, Tita, Tatîn—Popo, Pepín, Pancho—Quico, Quique. One rebel soldier was nicknamed Cantiflas, after a Mexican comic actor, another Baby, for reasons unknown. One thin woman was Arbolita, “Little Tree.” Celia teasingly called her stressed-out assistant, Felipe Guerra Matos, El Agitado, “the agitated one.”
One of the most beloved newcomers was Roberto Rodríguez, El Vaquerito, “the Little Cowboy,” who got his nickname from the ornate riding boots Celia gave him when he arrived in camp barefoot. Combined with a broad-rimmed straw hat, the boots made him look like a Mexican cattle hand. Indifferent to danger, he became a leader of Che’s “suicide squad,” which was given the most difficult tasks. El Vaquerito was cherished for his constant, almost childish good humor and his tall tales. Friends tallied up the stories of his adventures and figured he must have lived twice as long as his twenty years.
Still, despite such quirks, the Rebel Army was a barbaric-looking bunch. Their ranks were peppered with fearsome-looking reprobates, shady characters, and street kids in trouble with the law, and few paid attention to sartorial elegance, mixing and matching their ragged uniforms with guajiro garb, blue jeans, and captured army outfits. (Che compared their appearance to “pirates.”) The veteran male guerrillas were almost all bearded by now—the impish Raúl was one of the few who could not muster facial hair. They swore almost constantly, and reeked more than ever of sweat. Even Che, El Chancho, admitted that personal hygiene was an issue, as “our bodies gave off a peculiar and offensive stench that repelled anyone who came near.” One reason Celia wore mariposa flowers in the sierra was that their perfume masked the stench of body odor. (Another, more official reason, was their historical association: Cuban women in the nineteenth-century independence movement used garlands of the white mariposa, or “butterfly” lily, to smuggle anti-Spanish messages.)
The beards became a badge of identification, and it was now that the guerrillas came to be known simply as los barbudos, “the bearded ones.” Fidel also saw a practical advantage: as he later explained to the Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet, shaving wasted fifteen minutes of a man’s life every day. “If you multiply that fifteen minutes . . . by the number of days in a year, you’ll see that you devote almost 5,500 minutes annually to shaving. An eight-hour day of work consists of 480 minutes, so if you don’t shave you gain about ten days that you can devote to work, to reading, to sport, to whatever you like.” It also saved a fortune in razor blades and soap. The only downside, Fidel admitted, was that gray hairs sprout first in a beard. Clean-shaven men can “hide their ages better.”
THE EDUCATED GUERRILLAS continued to give literacy classes to poor farmers. They also provided a traveling health care system. Doctors were rarely seen in the Sierra Maestra, and from his earliest days, Che would set up a rustic clinic whenever they arrived at a village, taking up office in a corner of a thatch-roofed hut. He found it a dispiriting experience, since he saw the same illnesses resulting from generations of malnutrition, parasites, and overwork. On one occasion, he wrote, a little girl watched him for hours and then complained to her mother: “Mama, this doctor tells everyone the same story.” It was true, Che admitted to himself: “People in the Sierra grow like wild flowers, unattended. Then they fade away, constantly busy at thankless tasks.”
The guerrillas themselves were plagued by dental problems, especially Fidel, who had poor teeth to begin with. Leaving their toothbrushes behind in Mexico had proved unwise. Fidel constantly complained about toothaches and begged Celia to send a dentist from Manzanillo. (“It’s the limit,” he joked weakly. “Now that we have food, I can’t eat. Later when my teeth are all right, I won’t have any food.”) In late June she did send a dentist’s bag, and Che assumed the mantle of “tooth-puller.” Without painkillers, he resorted to swearing and intimidation to make rank and file patients submit. (He dubbed it “psychological anesthesia.”) His skills were sketchy at best. In his memoirs, he recalls being unable to extract a rotten canine from one unhappy “victim,” saying he would have needed dynamite to remove it. Che sagaciously did not attempt to apply this treatment to himself, leaving his own toothaches until the end of the war; Fidel also avoided him.
Over the summer, several more doctors joined the Rebel Army, releasing Che to concentrate on the military duties he preferred. The medical profession in Cuba had been sympathetic to the Movement from its earliest days. Doctors were regularly confronted with evidence of police torture and were targeted if they spoke out or testified in court. Many took refuge with the guerrillas. Word of their presence ensured that a parade of sick villagers would converge on their camps every night, turning each one into a “mobile emergency room,” according to Almeida. There would be “kids with diarrhea, kids with infections, kids with infested pimples, people with cataracts, people who need molars removed,” he marveled in his diary. (Almeida found the evidence of rural neglect added to his revolutionary zeal: “The heart burns up before so much human misery . . . It pains me that in the middle of the 20th century such things occur in Cuba. No, a thousand times no!”)
Doctors were also on the front lines during combat. Their tropical MASH units treated the wounded on the spot where they fell. Medics joked that they carried their surgeries in their backpacks and had mules as their ambulances. Operating tables were often the forest floor. Wounded men might go under the knife on bare hillsides, with IVs of saline solution hung from tree branches. Other first aid was more perfunctory: when Che was wounded in the foot, a friend removed the bullet using a razor blade.
A NEW PHASE of the guerrilla war began in September, when Comandante Che set off with his own hundred-man troop to create a permanent base in a valley called El Hombrito. His was the second “column” of troops, as rebels now dubbed their larger contingents, but Fidel decided to call it “the Fourth Column” to confuse the enemy and exaggerate their numbers. The idea was in part to give Che a break from the constant movement that exacerbated his asthma attacks. He threw himself enthusiastically into building his “extra-revolutionary society” with its own pig and chicken farms, a shoe factory, and a saddle workshop, as he had taken to riding a little mule. The camp printed its own newspaper, El Cubano Libre, to which he contributed as “the Sniper.” When the army destroyed the structures in December, Che re-created them in La Mesa, adding a field hospital, a slaughterhouse, and a small cigar factory, to feed his addiction.
In this community-building endeavor, Che relied on another strong-willed woman, Lidia Doce. Her recruitment is another of the forgotten milestones of Cuban feminism: she was forty-two years old, twice divorced, and the mother of three adult children when Che found her working at a bakery in the hamlet of San Pablo de Yao. One of her sons had joined his column at El Hombrito, so Che asked Lidia to help organize the camp. She soon did so, ordering his men around with a notoriously sharp tongue. (Che called her “tyrannical.”) He then asked Lidia to carry secret messages to Movement leaders in Santiago, a dangerous mission she executed with such aplomb that she was elevated to the trusted position of “executive courier”; from then on she carried the Rebel Army’s most sensitive documents, risking execution if she were captured.
Che’s column was notorious for its strict discipline enforced by a special police unit. No diaries were allowed in case they fell into enemy hands and yielded crucial information. (Only Che was above the directive.) Fires could only be lit after dark, and a bucket of water had to be kept nearby to douse it if a plane flew over. Any minor lapse while on guard duty was harshly punished. The men were wary of Che, but they begrudgingly admired his personal austerity. Like Fidel, he shared every danger and would not eat until the men had their share. Even so, the stress was too much for some. One lieutenant picked up his revolver and shot himself in the head in front of his stunned comrades. After this, Fidel decided to balance out Che’s toughness by appointing the happy-go-lucky Camilo Cienfuegos as his second-in-command. The constantly grinning Camilo, who looked more like a rumba dancer at a Havana nightclub than a soldier, proved the perfect foil to Che, lightening his mood with jokes and banter, and spouting quotes from his favorite book, Don Quixote.
Not that Che entirely lacked a sense of humor; he was often noted for his Argentine sense of irony. He dubbed new volunteers to his column descamisados, “shirtless ones,” after the working masses championed by Evita Perón in his homeland, and made fun of his own foreign origins: “Steal a dollar from an Argentine and he’ll kill you,” he liked to say, “but steal his woman and he’ll sing you a tango.”
Che was also becoming increasingly flamboyant. On one occasion, Raúl met him at 1:30 a.m. riding through the moonlit jungle on a white horse ahead of a captured army jeep and truck piled with supplies. Little wonder that photographers would soon be seeking out the inscrutable Argentine almost as often as they did Fidel.
AS 1957 PROGRESSED, the emboldened guerrillas honed their improvised strategies into a distinctive style of irregular warfare that would later be echoed by the Vietcong in the jungles of Southeast Asia. To pin down vastly larger enemy forces, the guerrillas would descend on the enemy’s weak point then melt like ghosts into the jungle, only to strike again at another vulnerable spot (a tactic Raúl nicknamed muerde y huye, “bite and flee”). The soldiers were often barely trained recruits led by officers fresh out of the classroom, and the rebel tactics eroded their spirit. Repeatedly ambushing the vanguard could derail an entire battalion, Fidel and Che found. Homemade land mines placed on the trail would scatter the first patrol, whose members could then be picked off individually. Or snipers would shoot one soldier in the leg, and when his companions dropped their weapons to carry him to safety, guerrillas would pounce from the foliage and capture them all. Even if the soldiers got away, the shouts and chaos would demoralize the others. Thus, wounding an enemy conscript was far more effective than killing one, Fidel instructed his men. Eventually, terrified soldiers would refuse to take the lead and, as Che rejoiced, “an army without a vanguard cannot advance.”
The army’s attempts to pursue the guerrillas were futile. By getting to know every wrinkle in the landscape, the rebels could “run like water through the enemy’s fingers,” as Fidel put it. Each entrance to the sierra, he boasted, was “a little Thermopylae,” where a small company could hold off an adversary force many times its own size.
Che would later write a classic handbook for budding partisans, Guerrilla Warfare, which—quite apart from handy tips on how to hang a hammock and what type of plate to buy—expanded on his favorite strategies, each of which took advantage of mobility and surprise. There was “the so-called minuet,” a dance-like maneuver where some twenty guerrillas would creep up on an enemy from the four points of the compass. When the first group of five men opened fire, the soldiers would rush towards them shooting randomly into the forest. That contingent would retreat while a second attack was launched from another direction. “The army will repeat its action and the guerrilla band the same,” Che instructs. The result confuses, immobilizes, and demoralizes the enemy, as well as wastes its ammunition. This tactic was especially effective after dark, when soldiers would often panic. (“The guerrilla fighter grows at night, and the enemy feels his fear growing in the darkness.”)
The rebels continued to experiment with homemade ordnance in their thatch-roofed armories. Their most striking success was a grenade launcher officially called the M-26 but more vividly nicknamed “the Sputnik.” A sawed-off shotgun mounted on a bipod provided a solid launching apparatus; the “grenade” was a Molotov cocktail attached to a cylindrical stick. Using an empty shotgun cartridge, the flaming, kerosene-filled bottle could be projected up to one hundred yards and exploded like Greek fire, an ancient version of napalm. It was “a weapon of extraordinary effectiveness,” Che gloated, and a terrifying sight for defendants as the projectile arched towards them—as the nickname suggests, resembling the first Soviet satellite launched in October, which they could spot streaking across the clear night skies.
Caution remained second nature. The disciplined guerrillas still spoke only in whispers both day and night, unlike the soldiers, who had a tendency to yell to one another and give themselves away. When the rebels got to a clearing, they would cross it one man at a time, at intervals, so a passing plane would think it was just a stray peasant. And the poor morale of the soldiers was an increasing contrast to the guerrillas’ cheery bravado. When three army trucks were ambushed by Che’s men at the sawmill settlement of Pino del Agua on September 17, most of the soldiers threw down their weapons and fled, leaving behind their wounded and four dead, a dismal performance that led to the court-martial of the commanding officer for cowardice. This was followed by a rare lapse in the guerrilla code, when a campesino whose family had been murdered by Rural Guards executed one of the wounded. When Che berated him for “savage” behavior, another injured soldier who had been pretending to be dead piped up and begged to be spared. Every time a rebel passed, he would shout, “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! Che says he doesn’t kill prisoners.” The soldier was taken to a field hospital and released when he had recovered.
There were also setbacks. In late August, Fidel and his men made a night assault on an army camp near the Palma Mocha River that seemed successful. But at dawn they were aghast to see 250 soldiers dug into trenches in the hills around them. Several guerrillas were killed as they beat a hasty retreat. While he was carrying their vital 50-millimeter machine gun, a hulking twenty-year-old named Pastor Palomares was hit in the legs and lower body. As he lay dying on the riverbank, Palomares whispered to his platoon leader that his wife was heavily pregnant and begged for Fidel to raise the child. The rebels were forced to abandon Palomares’s body, but farmers found and buried it a few days later. By then his right hand had been chopped off. The army had hoped this athletic, bearded character was Fidel himself and, unwilling to carry the whole corpse, had taken the appendage away for fingerprinting.