THE MOST LASTING CONSEQUENCE OF the hostage crisis was to draw attention to the army’s apocalyptic offensive in the Sierra Maestra, which was running into unexpected trouble. Batista’s censorship had imposed a complete news blackout, except for the usual fabricated press releases nobody paid attention to. (In the most egregious one, the military reported two hundred guerrillas killed with only one soldier wounded “in the hand”; Cubans joked that Batista had “the bulletproof army.”) But by July, Radio Rebelde’s reports that the mass invasion was faltering drew the attention of the gaggle of foreign journalists who had flown to Cuba. M-26-7 agents spirited several up to meet Fidel in the Comandancia, including NBC producer Morton Silverstein, who took back one of Castro’s hand-drawn battle maps to be published in the New York Times. Even the army would soon have to admit that something was going seriously awry in their “End of Fidel” campaign.
Despite the early setbacks, Fidel’s plan of falling back until he was ready to counterattack paid off on June 28 when an army patrol was ambushed at the Yara River. The vanguard was engulfed by a sixty-five-pound TNT explosion, then cut down by snipers. It was a total rout, and the Rebel Army’s first clear victory. Soldiers left behind their weapons, their wounded, and their dead. Twenty-three were taken prisoner, along with fifty rifles, ammunition, and—an item that would turn out to be even more valuable—an army radio transmitter with its codebook. The captives were then transferred to a holding camp rebels dubbed Puerto Malanga, “Tuber Port,” a play on the name of Batista’s notorious prison in Santiago, Puerto Boniato (“Sweet Potato Port”).
Although the army had clawed its way into rebel-controlled territory around Las Vegas in June, the deep sierra was proving far more daunting. In its dense jungles and gullies, patrols leading the two main pincer movements could be isolated and picked off. The conscripts were showing signs of exhaustion. But then in early July a new danger appeared when the third, amphibious prong of the invasion was launched. Supported by naval bombardments, 1,000 troops stormed the rocky beaches of the south coast, where the Sierra Maestra dips precipitously down to the Caribbean Sea, and surged inland to encircle the guerrillas.
As luck would have it, the landing was led by one of Fidel’s fellow law students from Havana University, Major José Quevado. On the spur of the moment, Fidel sent him an affectionate note, lapsing into the informal tú form of Spanish: “Dear friend, it would have been difficult to imagine when we knew each other at college that one day we would be fighting one another . . .” He concluded: “I sent off these lines without thinking about it . . . just to greet you and to wish you, very sincerely, good luck.” Quevado later admitted that he was perplexed and unnerved by the amiable missive, which was signed, “Your friend, Fidel Castro.”
The ensuing Battle of El Jigüey would prove to be Batista’s Stalingrad. Quevado’s men successfully hacked their way over one high ridge, but after heavy fighting were forced to retreat into a river valley. Instead of surrounding the rebels, the soldiers were trapped themselves. The air force tried to parachute in food, but the guerrillas intercepted the drops. Fidel used the captured radio transmitter to sow confusion, since the army high command (with extravagant incompetence) had failed to change the secret codes. He ordered a recruit with acting talent, Braulio Coroneaux, to transmit fabricated reports “in a desperate tone—that there are men starving to death in the mountains, that the rebels are still in the camp . . . and that for God’s sake they should send reinforcements, that there are many wounded.” The ruse worked and the air force swooped down to bomb their own men with napalm. “Now the guards run like hell every time they hear a plane,” Fidel exulted.
Twice Quevado tried to break out in vain. (“I control them completely,” Guillermo García gloated. “They even have to shit in their trenches.”) And it was at El Jigüey that the guerrillas honed psychological warfare. All through the night, loudspeakers blasted the maddeningly cheerful mariachi strains of “La Cucaracha” followed by a bland announcement: “You have now heard some pretty music. The battle begins again.” (The effect on troops huddled in the darkness, one officer admitted, was “devastating.”) On other nights, the guerrillas would fall silent and hide, pretending they had left; but when the soldiers began to explore, the barrage of gunfire would erupt. Fidel offered his old college mate Quevado—this time using the formal form of Spanish address, usted—an “honorable, dignified surrender.” Like his half-starved soldiers, the major himself was suffering from serious malnutrition. Fidel sent him some food so that he could be strong enough to meet him for negotiations, but he vomited it up. When Quevado finally arrived on horseback, Fidel greeted him like an old comrade and began chatting about their student days. The officer was dumbfounded: his first reaction was that Fidel was “crazy.” This was “the worst moment of my life,” Quevado recalled; he was sick and humiliated, and here was Fidel behaving as if they were back at the college café. Celia, ignoring a bomb that fell nearby, led the major to a cave to discuss surrender terms. Quevado was permitted to keep his pistol and even visit his men in the prison of Puerto Malanga by himself—“like a gentleman.” He would remain a prisoner at the Comandancia, where he was provided with food and cigars for several months, until he finally gave up and joined the rebels.
The last 150 soldiers at El Jigüey threw down their arms on July 21. “Try to have lunch prepared” for the surrender, Fidel told Che. He also wanted a record of the historic occasion: “Not one photo has been taken of anything. Could you do something about this? It’s a pity!”
QUEVADO’S SURRENDER WAS a shocking setback for the army, and Batista’s censors desperately tried to keep news from spreading. There were now 253 hungry soldiers in Puerto Malanga, a quarter of them wounded. The number was far more than the rebels could deal with, so Fidel contacted the International Red Cross to broker a prisoner return. He did not ask for an exchange, since the army left no rebel captives alive to swap.
The messenger chosen to arrange the cease-fire—a dangerous solo mission across enemy lines—was an extroverted seventeen-year-old girl known as Teté. Delsa Esther Puebla had experiences far beyond her years: she was only fifteen when she began transporting dynamite for the guerrillas beneath her crinoline dress in a special girdle nicknamed La Engañadora, “the Deceiver,” after a hit pop song. Forced to flee her hometown Yara in July 1957, Teté was in the first group of three women to arrive in the Sierra Maestra. (The others, met by Juan Almeida, were Geña Verdecia and Ileana Rodés.) When they first arrived, one of the males asked: “What is this mocosa [snot-nosed kid] doing here?”—providing her with a permanent nickname. But Fidel was genuinely delighted: “The women have arrived!” he declared. “Now the guerrilla forces are really growing.”
Twelve months later, Teté’s negotiating role involved a new level of risk. Che, who was overseeing the prisoner return, reasoned that Batista’s trigger-happy soldiers would probably just shoot a male guerrilla on sight, but would hesitate to gun down a guerrillera. Even so, he sat her down to prepare her for the worst: “All right, Teté, three things can happen,” she recalled him saying. “The [army] can accept the truce and everything’s fine. Or they can kill you. Or they can take you prisoner and take you to Bayamo.” The latter option might involve torture, rape, and execution. Even after this dubious pep talk, Teté signed on.
At dawn on July 24 she let down her long, tawny hair to make her gender obvious, mounted a mule, and set off for the enemy camp. She was in uniform but unarmed and carrying a white flag tied to a long stick. The mission was expected to only take a few hours, but delays began immediately when aerial bombing forced her off the trail. When Teté finally approached the sentries, they were confused by the strange sight of a woman in khakis; unable to think what else to do, they let her past. As she rode through the muddy outpost, soldiers stopped in their tracks to stare. The commander, Captain Carlos Durán Batista, tried at first to bully her. He ordered her to take her M-26-7 armband off and when she refused, threatened to arrest her. According to Teté, “he was insulting and asked me how a pretty girl like me could be with that filthy and bedraggled bunch of guerrillas.” His main concern, it transpired, was keeping news of Quevado’s defeat a secret from his own men to keep morale from crumbling. He wanted the troops to somehow believe that the returned prisoners were really captured rebels. But with little alternative, the captain begrudgingly agreed to a cease-fire the next day.
When Teté made it back into the guerrilla camp at dusk, Fidel, Che, and Camilo were all waiting for her anxiously. They greeted her with cheers and carried her around the camp on their shoulders. But the danger was far from over: she had to head back that same night to confirm the cease-fire. Captain Durán made her sleep in his own tent so she wouldn’t talk to the soldiers, but she snuck out into the trenches after he fell asleep.
The next morning, Che arrived with the 253 prisoners marching in single file. They made, as Teté recalled, “a strange caravan.” The wounded used canes or crutches fashioned from branches; the most seriously injured were carried in hammocks slung from poles. The soldiers stood gaping. Fidel recalled: “If the presence of a woman guerrilla, Teté, had been the cause for great excitement amongst the guards, even more astonishing was the surprise arrival of Che . . . [He] had already become a legend, and the soldiers relished the opportunity to see the Argentine guerrilla fighter in person.”
EL JIGÜEY HAD tipped the balance of the offensive. In a confidential report to Batista, a sheepish General Cantillo guessed that the guerrillas had fielded between 1,000 and 2,000 men “of the first class, quite well armed.” (“On top of that, almost every inhabitant, man, woman or child, of the high sierra is a rebel confidant, courier or informer.”) He admitted that most of his own troops could not cope with the terrain; perhaps it was wiser to lure the guerrillas into the open plains. Fear of the barbudos was now seeping through the armed forces: rumors spread that troops in Havana would jump from the trucks when told they were going to be airlifted to Oriente.
The Rebel Army now began regaining the territory it had lost. The strategic village of Las Vegas was seized in late July, to Fidel’s great satisfaction; the rest of the Free Zone soon followed. At Las Mercedes, the rebels even captured a Sherman tank, a potentially fabulous prize that induced in Fidel fantastic visions of storming like Patton across the sierra. Unfortunately, it was stuck in a deep muddy ditch, and all efforts to drive it out failed. Fidel even hired a team of oxen to pull it out, but the tank’s steering system broke, rendering it useless. (“Hopes dashed,” Fidel wrote mournfully. “It has been a long time since I’ve had such pipe dreams.”)
When another 160 soldiers surrendered, the army began withdrawing from the Sierra Maestra altogether. By August 7 the last government troops were gone. Even to the guerrillas, the lopsided victory was like something out of a fairy tale. Years later, Fidel started his memoir about the campaign by saying that he couldn’t decide on a title: “I didn’t know whether to call this Batista’s Last Offensive or How 300 Defeated 10,000, which sounds like a story from One Thousand and One Nights.” (He decided on The Strategic Victory.) In the seventy-four days of fighting, only thirty-one guerrillas had been killed; army casualties were ten times that number, with 1,000 wounded. The Rebel Army had captured a total of 443 prisoners and 507 weapons. “The offensive has been liquidated,” Radio Rebelde crowed. “The biggest military effort in the history of our Republic has ended in the most shocking disaster the arrogant dictator could have imagined. His troops are in open retreat.” The Free Zone was now permanent: “The Sierra Maestra, in effect, has been liberated forever.”
Only now did New York Times stringer Ruby Hart Phillips decide she had better buy a shortwave radio to keep abreast of rebel broadcasts. Like other Cubans, she had to listen to them furtively, closing all doors and windows in her office and turning up the air-conditioning full blast to foil eavesdroppers.
ON AUGUST 13, Celia threw a surprise party for Fidel’s thirty-second birthday on a forested mountainside. In perhaps her most elegant logistical achievement, she had an ice cream cake shipped up from Manzanillo; it survived the scorching summer heat by being packed in dry ice. Fidel was delighted. And yet, as he confessed to her in private: “In the middle of my happiness at our victory, the culmination of so many sacrifices and efforts, I feel sad.” The summer triumph was made bittersweet by the loss of close friends. The stalwart Beto Pesant, one of the Movement’s first supporters in the Oriente, was blown up by accident while he was handling an antiaircraft shell. Che was thrown a distance by the explosion, and his lover Zoila ran up to Beto, horrified. (“Beto, don’t die, don’t die!” she shouted until Che took her aside, whispering, “Zoila, he’s gone.”) Pesant’s wife traveled to the front lines for the funeral: “We all cried and when I looked at Guevara he had tears in his eyes.” René Ramos Latour, the former Santiago chief aka “Daniel,” was hit in the stomach by mortar shrapnel in the last days of the offensive. Che dashed to the clinic “only to find a corpse at my arrival.” The wound was several inches deep, he lamented, “but he could have been saved if he had had immediate medical attention.”
Pedro Miret, meanwhile, had a lucky escape: he was hit in the chest by a ricocheting bullet from a strafing plane, but it didn’t penetrate beyond the breastbone.
THE FINAL PRISONER return in early August had been a cordial affair: one of the negotiating army officers offered to take Fidel for a spin in his Soviet-made Sikorsky helicopter. To the shock of their bodyguards, Fidel, Che, and Celia all hopped on board and took off for an aerial tour of the Sierra Maestra, enjoying the clear day and recognizing key landmarks. “It was a Fidel-type thing,” his aide-de-camp later said with a shrug. This time, the army captives were exchanged for $10,000 worth of medicine and plasma. “You may have the mountains,” Colonel Fernando Neugart magnanimously conceded, “but we are waiting for you in the valleys.”
There is no record of Fidel’s response, but he already had other plans.