QUITE APART FROM the physical hardship, there was a personal cost to the guerrilla life. An insight into the stresses during this precarious, nomadic phase in 1957 is provided by the unpublished field diary of Juan Almeida, the thirty-year-old black construction worker who was also a prolific poet and songwriter. Buried in the Office of Historical Affairs in Havana, the journal has never been cited by historians even in Cuba, perhaps because of its air of raw confession. As platoon leader, Almeida led some twenty men around the sierra, constantly on the move for months, and his musings—scribbled in the lull of dawn and dusk at camp every day—are laced with doubt and soul-searching. Almeida had left behind a girlfriend in Mexico City but had not heard a word from her since landing in the Granma. Wracked by nostalgia, tormented by solitude, he poured out his feelings and composed tearful love verses. (“Did I love you? I don’t know! . . . Did I shiver in your arms? Yes, like a leaf in the breeze.”) But his longings weren’t always directed to his distant novia: as he wove from village to village, Almeida developed a crush on almost every eligible female he met. Shopgirls, farmers’ daughters, comely guerrillera volunteers—all became the potential objects of his affection. Recounted with winning candor, his frustrations are woven through the more practical reports on guerrilla life that we are familiar with from the diaries of Che and Raúl, including the obsessive catalogs of foodstuffs and clinical notes on bowel disorders.
One week Almeida falls for two Seventh-day Adventist girls. (“But nothing happened. We said good-bye.”) The next he flirts with a pretty teen who visits his camp with her mother. (“I saw in her eyes something beautiful, like a glimpse of the Sierra.”) In August he was captivated by the first three young women to officially join the Rebel Army after Celia, including the steel-nerved Geña Verdecia, who had smuggled dynamite and bullets under her skirt to the guerrillas in the early days. (“She still has the same effect on me as the first time we met.”) Receiving a letter from his family in Havana filled Almeida with yearning (“I am guarding it like something sacred”), as did remembering his sister’s birthday. An amorous night with a village girl named Esperanza did nothing to help. (“I confess I made love to her because I felt lonely, so immensely lonely.”) As ever, he was forced to leave the next day with his men. (“God knows what tomorrow will bring.”) Another dating opportunity was provided when some villagers mingled with the guerrillas at an isolated bodega. (“Contact with women. Pretty and ugly.”) But his hopes for a liaison with a mulatta named Xiomena were dashed. (“Such a disappointment.”)
The most promising encounter was with a tender-hearted farm girl named Juana, who had nursed Almeida while he was recovering from his wounds after the battle of El Uvero. He had thought of her often, and written poems about her. (“And why in my sorrow does the memory of that woman’s face come?”) In mid-October he finally passed near Juana’s village; he dallied in his old flame’s house so long that his platoon left without him, and he had to be fetched by messenger. But the romantic idyll had by then gone awry: while they were lying in bed and listening to music, Juana opened the medal of the Virgin of Guadeloupe hanging around Almeida’s neck and found a photograph of his Mexican girlfriend inside. “Now she treats me distantly . . . with something more like sisterly affection,” Almeida sighed in his diary, adding unconvincingly: “Anyway, it’s better like that.”
EVEN THE ASCETIC Che had to admit that endlessly roaming the sierra had its downsides. “There are periods of boredom in the life of every guerrilla fighter,” he observes in his handbook Guerrilla Warfare. The best remedy for ennui, Che helpfully suggests, is reading. In fact, visitors to the mountains were often struck by the rebels’ literary leanings: it was common in the jungle camps to see men hunched over books in every spare minute.
Che recommends edifying works of nonfiction despite their annoying weight: “Good biographies of past heroes, histories, or economic geographies” will distract men from vices such as gambling and drinking. An early favorite in camp, improbably, was a Spanish-language Reader’s Digest tome on great men in US history, which the CBS journalist Robert Taber noticed was passed around from man to man (possibly for his benefit). But literary fiction did have its place, especially if it fit into the revolutionary framework. One big hit was Curzio Malaparte’s Skin, a novel recounting the brutality of occupied Naples after the Second World War. (Always convinced of victory, Fidel thought it would help ensure good behavior amongst the men when they marched into Havana.) A dog-eared copy of Zola’s psychological thriller The Beast Within was also pored over with an intensity that can only impress modern bibliophiles. Raúl recalled in his diary that he was lost in “the first dialogue of Séverine with the Secretary General of Justice” while lying in ambush one morning, only to be startled by the first shots of battle. To keep his mind active, Raúl also kept up his French studies throughout the war, switching tutors from Che to El Francés, “the Frenchman,” Armando Torres, who had once studied in Paris.
Hours at night could also be whiled away listening to storytellers. Two rustic poets even took to holding verse competitions, the guerrilla version of poetry slams. A peasant named José de la Cruz called himself “the mountain nightingale” and composed epic ballads in ten-verse guajira stanzas about the adventures of the troop. Like a Homer of the jungle, “Crucito” sat with his pipe by the campfire and spouted his comic lyrics while denouncing his rival, Calixto Morales, as “the buzzard of the plains.” Tragically, this oral tradition was lost to posterity when the troubadour Crucito was killed. There had not been enough spare paper to record his verse.
But the most beguiling snippet for literature lovers is Fidel’s assertion that he studied Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 classic For Whom the Bell Tolls for tips on guerrilla warfare. Papa’s tome, Fidel declared during an interview with Ignacio Ramonet, allowed him and his men “to actually see that experience [in the Sierra Maestra] . . . as an irregular struggle, from the political and military point of view.” “That book became a familiar part of my life,” Fidel added. “And we always went back to it, consulted it, to find inspiration.”
“Ernesto,” as the famous American expat was fondly known in Cuba, had written the novel based on his experience as a correspondent in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, and its pages are filled with descriptions of combat behind enemy lines. He had hammered out the manuscript on a Royal typewriter in room 511 of the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Old Havana, never imagining that a similar war would begin in his adopted home. Although it was released when the Cuban guerrillas were children, they grew up very aware of the bestseller (in translation as Por quién doblan las campanas), not to mention the 1943 Hollywood version starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman. Fidel first read it as a student; he says he reread it at least twice in the sierra.
When it comes to specific tactics—the art of ambush, for example, or how to manage supply lines—For Whom the Bell Tolls doesn’t offer much insight. There are a few straightforward tips about, say, attaching strings to grenade pins so they can be detonated from a distance, or descriptions of the ideal partisan hideout. But the novel is a perceptive handbook to the psychological element of irregular warfare. The hero Robert Jordan is forced to navigate an alien world filled with exotic personalities and possible betrayals, much as Fidel’s men did in the Sierra Maestra. Translated to their Caribbean setting, there are many parallels between the novel and the Rebel Army’s situation, from the importance of keeping a positive attitude among the troops to Robert Jordan’s rules for getting along in Latin culture: “Give the men tobacco and leave the women alone,” mirroring Fidel’s unbreakable rule that village girls never be molested. (Of course, it’s a rule that Robert Jordan breaks in the novel. His torrid affair with the alluring Maria includes a detailed forest romp that can only have impressed the affection-starved Juan Almeida.)
Although Hemingway surely would have been flattered that the Cuban rebels were poring over his golden prose, he was surprisingly silent about the revolution. His fishing boat captain, Gregorio Fuentes, boasted afterward that he and Ernesto had smuggled guns for Fidel in the Pilar, but it appears to have been a tall tale concocted for tourists. In private, Hemingway was disparaging about Batista, and in one letter called him a “son-of-a-bitch.” But his only public protest came when he donated his Nobel Prize medal to the Cuban people: rather than let a government body display it, he left it in the Iglesia de la Caridad del Cobre for safekeeping. (It is still there, in a glass wall case.)
Even Batista’s own intelligence service found it hard to believe that Ernesto was neutral, and several times soldiers searched his Havana mansion for weapons while he was away traveling. On one occasion the intruders were attacked by Hemingway’s favorite dog, an Alaskan springer named Black Dog (Blackie); they bludgeoned it to death with rifle butts in front of horrified servants. Blackie was buried in the garden “pet cemetery” next to the swimming pool, where he had lolled happily at his master’s feet for many years. When he returned to Havana, Hemingway stormed in outrage to the local police office to file a report, ignoring the warnings of Cuban friends. A local might have been given a beating, but Hemingway’s celebrity protected him—although, needless to say, no investigation ever resulted.
WHETHER INSPIRED BY Papa or not, as 1957 wore on, the guerrillas’ strategies continued to be refined. In November, Almeida was put in charge of expanding the war by descending from the Sierra Maestra for the first time to burn the sugarcane fields. Fidel had long espoused the idea, but it was controversial: the first random attempts the year before had nearly caused a rift with his most powerful ally in the mountains, the grizzled Crescencio Pérez, who objected that it would destroy the livelihoods of the itinerant workers who depended on the zafra for their survival. Sugar was not just integral to the economy of the Oriente, Pérez protested; it was a part of its cultural identity. But Fidel was insistent. Taxes from the sugar crop were propping up Batista, he argued, and economic sabotage had always been an accepted “act of war.” (“During your revolution, didn’t the American colonists throw tea into Boston Harbor as a legitimate defense measure?” he asked Andrew St. George.) To prove his moral commitment, Fidel ordered his own family’s fields to be torched first.
Leaflets were also distributed around Cuba asking for help from budding pyromaniacs. The first new harvest after the revolution’s triumph “will be a zafra of freedom, a zafra of love. It will be YOUR ZAFRA, not Batista’s.” On the other side of the leaflet was a handy guide to incendiary devices—Arson 101—with cartoons in the style of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Option A resembled a high school chemistry experiment: a rubber tube filled with the volatile liquid bisulfide of carbon and shards of phosphorous; when they come into contact with a cellulose sheath a chemical reaction makes them burst into flames. (“The uncontrollable fire begins in 40 minutes.”) Option B was a serious step down in technology: a petrol-doused sponge is tied with a yard-long cord to a ferret or the tail of a cat, which will then run through the fields in panic, causing havoc “for up to a kilometer.” (“The animal generally survives.”) Plan C was even more basic but perhaps more practical: a slingshot could shoot pellets of flaming red phosphorous collected from match heads straight into the fields. The range was often over one hundred yards, the leaflet advised, and the balls will burn for half an hour.
In mid-November, Almeida and fifty men slipped into the sugar plantations. The reporter Andrew St. George traveled with them. “By dusk, the skyline billowed with smoke and flamed with a purple, neon-like glow,” he wrote in Look. They met surprisingly little military resistance. Planes strafed the rural roads but there was no sign of army troops. After setting several devastating fires, the rebels were even able to commandeer a bus to get back to the sierra, singing “their favorite Pancho Villa revolutionary song, Cama de Piedra (‘Of stone will be the pillow of the woman who loves me . . .’).”
NOW THAT THEY were almost constantly together, the relationship between Fidel and Celia continued to strengthen. But even for them guerrilla love was no picnic: the power couple’s personal feelings always took a distant second place to the demands of revolution. Celia did make the occasional stab at romance. One night, during a lull in the fighting, they were holed up in an abandoned farmhouse enjoying a cozy domestic scene almost out of an eighteenth-century Flemish painting. Fidel was reading by a fireplace, and Celia had arranged for a piglet to be roasted—the Cuban equivalent of foie gras—with a good bottle of Spanish wine. As a surprise, she had also invited the easygoing Raúl, who Celia found “the best and most affectionate person that anyone can imagine.” But when he appeared in the doorway at dusk after trekking all day, Fidel took one look at his younger brother and snapped: “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you with your troops?” Raúl simply turned around and left without a word. The domestic illusion was punctured. Fidel went back to reading his book.