THE ARMY HAD tried so often to dislodge the guerrillas without success, it had become a professional embarrassment. This time there was to be no doubt, as Batista threw Cuba’s entire military juggernaut into the Sierra Maestra. To make sure his officers got the point, the invasion was dubbed Operation FF—Fin de Fidel, “End of Fidel.”
IT WAS ONE of the most unevenly matched campaigns in modern history. Seventeen battalions swarmed into the mountains in a three-pronged assault to create a stranglehold around the guerrillas. The 10,000 soldiers were backed by tanks and helicopters; aerial and naval bombardments would pound civilian supporters into submission; and an amphibious landing would seize the south coast. The whole operation was led by the army’s most competent commander, General Eulogio Cantillo. Against this onslaught, the Rebel Army at first fielded 280 men, with some 200 guns between them. Only a fraction carried modern weapons, mostly captured US-made M1 Garands, while the rest sported shotguns, low-caliber hunting rifles, and antique Winchesters. Each rebel was given about fifty bullets. Some of them had no boots, and even Fidel’s uniform was now threadbare: “I look like a beggar,” he complained to Celia. Almeida’s and Camilo’s platoons were recalled to reinforce the fragile lines, bringing the Rebel Army up to (it was later calculated) a grand total of 321 men. Fidel, with his love for classical references, compared the odds to the stand of the 300 Spartans against the Persian hordes at Thermopylae—although the biblical saga of David and Goliath must have also sprung to mind.
No sooner had the invasion begun than Fidel received a polite message from General Cantillo suggesting the guerrillas surrender. Cantillo was known to be one of Batista’s few humane officers, so Fidel replied in civil fashion: “I think highly of you . . . I appreciate your noble feelings towards us, who are, after all, your compatriots, not your enemies, because we are not at war against the armed forces, but the dictatorship.”
Seventy-four straight days of fighting followed. The guerrillas came close to annihilation on several occasions, but thanks to the veil of censorship, the outside world had little idea what was going on unless they tuned in to Radio Rebelde, leaving most to speculate that the revolt was quietly fading away in the mountains.
The situation looked hopeless on paper, but the rebels used every trick at their disposal. The mines and booby traps paralyzed the advance. Snipers held off hundreds of soldiers advancing in single file through narrow passes. And the sierra residents provided near-instant “combat intelligence.” Batista’s men could not move a yard, it was later said, without a sweaty farmer arriving to report it. All this sapped the army’s delicate morale. Two-thirds of the casquitos were still unseasoned conscripts. The army’s numerical advantage was squandered by inefficiency, with pointless saturation bombings, false starts, and misguided troop movements. By contrast, the rebels were obsessively careful with their resources, squeezing off their rounds one by one and rushing their only heavy machine gun from point to point so quickly that the army believed they had three or four.
Fidel and Celia traveled together by jeep along tracks carved into cliffs, speeding from crisis to crisis to cajole the men and shore up tattered defenses. At night they drove without headlights, using a torch for river crossings. They had a driver but were rarely accompanied by bodyguards, since they now had complete confidence in the safety of the Free Zone. Celia’s pockets bulged with letters, which Fidel would dictate at any moment. Her role as the conduit for his impetuous thoughts was now an accepted part of the command chain. Despite the telephone line, most platoons still received orders via a blizzard of notes, often on the torn-out pages of schoolbooks, and Fidel’s hand-drawn maps. Shreds from this urgent back-and-forth have survived in the Havana archives. One typical note to Ramón Paz, a key lieutenant on the front lines, begins: “How many messages I’ve sent you today! And always, even before the instructions reach you, the situation changes . . .” Fidel then added a rudimentary sketch of river valleys and trenches resembling a collapsed spiderweb.
Che was now the top comandante in the field, even though he often gave himself asthma injections in the thick of battle. Fidel himself was forced to keep his distance. Forty veterans had signed a plea that he retire from active combat, as he was too valuable to lose: “Do it for Cuba,” they urged. He chafed at the new role. “I miss those days when I was really a soldier,” he complained to Celia. “I felt much happier then. This struggle has become a miserable, petty bureaucratic task for me.” On another occasion: “I’m fucked . . . There are twenty little problems to resolve.” Some of these problems were little indeed: “Tomorrow have them fetch the cheese. Today, they’re bringing honey; it’s for dessert. Sugar has to be divided. The box must last for two weeks.”
FIDEL LATER WROTE an 850-page account of the ten-week operation, covering thirty battles in exquisite detail. June was the bleakest month. The Rebel Army was often in disarray, with scenes that were far from heroic. As the scale of the summer offensive dawned on the guerrillas, there were many desertions and cases of insubordination. The low point came on June 19 when rebels defending the strategic village of Las Vegas de Jibacoa, the key to the lower stretch of the Sierra Maestra, threw down their rifles and ran for it, abandoning a valuable detonator cable and bomb, and leaving the trail to the Comandancia entirely exposed. Che wrote with bitter irony to Fidel that “your order not to waste ammunition has been fulfilled” by the unseemly retreat. Fidel was furious at the “shameful” news; he redoubled the order that Las Vegas was to be defended “inch by inch.”
Until this point, Fidel had been willing to give ground so he could strike back later from a position of strength. But the rebels now controlled only about four square miles and could fall back no farther. In the most desperate moment of the war, he assigned forty men to hold Las Vegas and the key crest of the sierra. Again and again soldiers tried to cross the Santo Domingo River a few hundred yards below and were beaten back by sniper fire, directed by Fidel staring down at the enemy with binoculars. After dark the guerrillas experimented with psychological warfare, setting up loudspeakers to blare the national anthem interspersed with withering speeches. Fidel told the conscripts not to die for a corrupt regime that cared nothing for them: soldiers were risking their lives for $30 a month, while Batista and his hyenas reaped millions in luxury.
The ridge was held, but on June 27 the rebels finally had to abandon Las Vegas. Che was riding into the village on his little mule, blissfully ignorant of his danger, when he was intercepted by the last rebel leaving, saved from capture by minutes.
FOR CELIA, THIS defeat was made more bitter by personal loss. Three days earlier she had heard on the radio that her beloved father had lost a long battle with lung cancer in Havana. Che heard the same broadcast and sent her a tender missive whose poetic economy might be a template for all sympathy notes: “Celia: I suppose you’ve learned of your father’s death. I wouldn’t like to be the bearer of bad news. Between us there is no space for formal condolences; I only remind you that you can always count on me. A brotherly hug from Che.”
Only much later did Celia learn that SIM agents had infiltrated her father’s funeral in Havana thinking—incredibly—that she might turn up in disguise. It was a waste of manpower that echoed the pointless bombing in the sierra. When guests arrived at the religious service in a chapel beneath the Havana Hilton, located next to the Polynesian Room restaurant, they were appalled to see sharpshooters lining the roofs nearby. IDs were checked by police at the door and the crowd was stacked with thickset Batista goons. One of Dr. Sánchez’s’s closest friends, a wealthy sugar magnate, angrily dialed the dictator’s personal number and told him the police presence was disrespectful: “I’d be very grateful if you’d take care of it,” he said, and hung up without waiting for an answer. Minutes later a SIM officer walked in and clapped his hands twice. The strangers left.
Che had celebrated his thirtieth birthday two weeks earlier, on June 14, presiding over the trial of a guerrilla officer accused of abusive behavior. (Che stripped him of his command.) Earlier in the summer he had spoken briefly to his mother in Argentina via radio. An affectionate letter was soon smuggled to his camp, filled with domestic news of his family and how they all missed him. In a moving passage Señora Guevara wrote about her own loneliness and how distant Che had seemed on the radio call. (“I don’t know how to write you, or even what to say to you; I have lost the measure . . . So many things I wanted to say, my dear. I am afraid to let them out. I leave them to your imagination.”) Whether Che felt a twinge of homesickness or not, he threw himself with even more energy into combat and criticized himself for any instinct of self-preservation: “Personally, I noted something I had never felt before: the need to live,” he wrote after one near-fatal skirmish. “That had better be corrected at the next opportunity.” This survival instinct was a failure Che harshly attacked in others—the source of weakness, cowardice, and desertion. He had to purge all traces of it in himself.