AS THE SECOND anniversary of the Granma landing approached, Fidel was able to celebrate two days early. On November 30, a 2,500-strong Batista force abandoned Guisa, a strategic town in the lowlands of Oriente, to the Rebel Army, ending a ten-day battle. Cheered on by the townsfolk, the barbudos entered the blacked-out streets and went straight to a bodega, where Fidel purchased the entire food stock for his hungry troops. Sitting on a wooden crate by candlelight, he devoured two cans of Spanish tuna with his fingers, washed down with tinned fruit juice. As ever, Celia was by his side with a nylon bag over her shoulder stuffed with documents. On December 2, the Granma anniversary, Fidel spent hours answering written questions from international journalists about the sudden acceleration of the war. The rebels were doing what nobody had thought possible: taking the fight to Batista in the plains. Rumors spread among Santería believers that the rebels used voodoo to make bullets bounce from their bodies. Spent shells could be purchased for $10 each as good luck charms.
For a month beforehand, guerrillas had been spilling from the mountains. On November 3, Che and Camilo made forays from the Escambray to disrupt rigged presidential elections, although Batista’s candidate romped home on fake ballots delivered around Cuba by the air force. Later in the month, Raúl and Almeida led troops from the Sierra Cristal. Finally, Fidel himself had said farewell to the comforts of the Comandancia and descended to the llanos. The quiet months after the army’s failed summer offensive had allowed him to expand his force from three hundred to eight hundred. Although few of them had combat experience, they acquitted themselves well at Guisa against four times as many soldiers.
Five Marianas also joined the attack even though they had left their rifles back in the Comandancia; like the new male recruits, they were expected to seize weapons from the army. One, Ada Bella Acosta, carried an old revolver and used it to force a cowering soldier to surrender. In another set-piece moment for Cuban feminism, the soldier scowled at her: “If I knew you were a woman, I would never have surrendered.” The fifteen-year-old Norma, who was by her side, suggested that Bella return the man his rifle “so he can battle it out with you.” The soldier quickly backtracked, stam mering, “No, no, I’ve already surrendered now anyway!”
This larger-scale combat in the plains required new tactics. The guerrillas dug extensive trenches and handmade larger mines that could stop armored cars and Sherman tanks. They also excavated and covered holes in the few muddy roads, which could swallow heavy vehicles. While besieging the Guisa barracks, the guerrillas also became more creative in tormenting the enemy with loudspeakers after dark. In saccharine voices, they would mock the casquitos as Batista’s dupes before letting off a fifteen-minute volley of gunfire. This would be followed by a hideously out-of-tune pop song, Ahorita va a llover, ahorita va a llover. Ay, el que no tenga paraguas, el agua lo va a coger . . . (“In a little while, it’s going to rain . . . Whoever has no umbrella is going to get soaked . . .”) Even on the first night, Lieutenant Reinaldo Blanco, at the ripe age of twenty the senior army officer, sighed: “They are going to drive us crazy in here.” After holding out for eight nights, the nerve-racked Blanco received the order to withdraw: “Burn the town, kill the prisoners and to hell with everything.” (In fact he retreated peacefully and let his one captive free—an honorable act for which Fidel sent a personal letter of thanks.)
As the year drew to a close, everyone in Cuba was jumping on the Fidelista bandwagon. Respectable middle-class citizens were now openly pro-Castro. Donations flooded in from Cuban industrialists. Even the conservative Association of Cuban Landholders begged Batista to step aside. The highest levels of government were being pervaded by a sense of defeatism and impotence. After the defeat at Guisa, the army too slid into a defensive paralysis: their rural barracks now stood as isolated as medieval castles while the rebels prowled freely around them. A domino effect set in. Prisoners who surrendered at one stronghold would be handed over to the Red Cross, who transported them to the next barracks. The former captives would describe how well they had been treated by the rebels and convince their hosts to give up—and so on across eastern Cuba. By contrast, at each liberated village, a festive mood prevailed as locals posed with rebels for souvenir photos and feted them with lavish feasts. Long gone were the lean repasts of the sierra: Manuel Fajardo wrote a glowing letter to Celia about an unforgettable breakfast of fresh orange juice, two fried eggs, bread and butter, and café con leche. His men were having three square meals a day, he marveled, “all accompanied by dessert.”
A PERCEPTIVE GLIMPSE of this new stage of the war comes from the legendary Dickey Chapelle (née Georgette Meyer), America’s first woman war photographer, who spent three weeks on the front lines with Fidel in early December. A veteran of the Pacific War, Algeria, and the Hungarian uprising (where she had spent two months in a Russian prison), the hard-as-nails Chapelle got into Santiago by dressing up as a ditzy tourist in spike heels, dangle earrings, and a fluffy sky-blue shirt, chaperoned by a “girl courier” with enormous eyelashes. (Chapelle reports that her guide was later captured and murdered.) A police officer at first refused to allow Chapelle to leave the airport: “There is nothing for you here, nothing.” When she bluffed that she was on her way to a forbidden love tryst with a Marine from Guantánamo Bay, the official relented and let her pass “with a fourteen karat leer.” She spent a day trying to find camera gear and film—she had given her Leicas to M-26-7 agents to smuggle in, but they had disappeared. Other foreign journalists had already given up on the Cuba story, Chapelle discovered: she ran into Andrew St. George on his way back to the US for the holidays because Fidel’s offensive had “stalled.” “I probably was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she lamented.
As a feminist pioneer, Chapelle had more reason than most to be fascinated by the Marianas she soon encountered in battle. “I was never more proud to be a woman than when I marched with Fidel Castro’s Cuban guerrillas,” she wrote in Coronet magazine. “I saw members of my sex perform breathless deeds of valor—squirming through roadblocks with ten grenades hooked to their belts and fighting alongside the Fidelista troops, an 11-lb rifle in their manicured hands.” Chapelle was famous for her distinctive sartorial style, sporting cat-eye glasses and pearl earrings even during the battle of Iwo Jima. In Cuba she related in particular to the well-groomed Celia, who, Chapelle noted, “could deploy mortars like a man yet clung to her femininity,” having designed her own uniform of “green twill tapered slacks and V-necked over-blouse.” She was also struck by her fellow MIT grad, Vilma: “While snipers exchanged shots, she and Raúl would neck in foxholes,” she wrote. “Yet I rarely saw Vilma without an automatic rifle, and she practically cooed when Raúl brought her a new, European-made paratrooper’s gun with a special folding stock.”
Her sojourn with the guerrillas was action-packed. When the clutch of a jeep she was traveling in gave out, one of the passengers was killed by a flying petrol drum, but Dickey somehow escaped with only a sprained ankle. Chapelle rescued other injured men on horseback then photographed them recuperating in the field clinic, a former coffee-drying shed. Chapelle was also present at the “family reunion” when Fidel and Raúl met up after nine months apart. Any differences between the brothers over the hostage crisis were forgotten thanks to Raúl’s enormous recent success in seizing the Oriente’s north. “Fidel, tremendous in wet and muddy fatigues, laughed deeply as he swung back and forth in a hammock,” she wrote. “Raúl spoke shrilly and incessantly of his victories.” Celia, meanwhile, “hovered . . . thin and febrile.” Chapelle found that the “emotional tension” surrounding Fidel never stopped as he paced back and forth and barked orders. (“It was nearly impossible to photograph him.”) Any good news prompted bear hugs with his men; setbacks were greeted with an “earthquake loss of temper.” “He reacted with Gargantuan anger to every report of dead and wounded,” she recalled, and insisted that she photograph rebel corpses “so their martyrdom will not be forgotten by the world.” Fidel’s “incisive mind” was at odds with his bottomless hunger for conflict, she concluded, reflecting a “psychopathic temper.” The placid Midwesterner Chapelle found the perpetual whirlwind of emotion exhausting, and discovered that she could only get any of the guerrillas to listen to her by feigning a volcanic “Latin” fury.
In battle after battle she saw how Batista’s vastly superior army—which “by all military theory since Hannibal . . . still held the advantage”—would crumple before the rebels. The reason, Chapelle explained in a long technical article in the Marine Corps Gazette, was the guerrillas’ iron determination and their simple tactic of shooting nonstop. Fidel’s men, now flush with ammunition, fired their guns at the enemy without a second’s respite. Unwilling to die for Batista, soldiers fled in the face of this “unfaltering hail of lead,” even if a small effort might win the day. Whenever they surrendered, Raúl would give them a speech promising that, even if they took up arms again, they would be released unharmed. “The utter contempt for the fighting potential of the defeated had an almost physical impact. Some actually flinched as they listened.”
AS THE SITUATION in the Oriente degenerated, rumors spread in Havana that Batista was mentally disturbed. He now rarely appeared in public, shuffling in a bulletproof black Cadillac (license plate 1) between the Presidential Palace, where his office windows were now covered by steel plates to deter snipers, and his fortress-like rural estate Kuquine, whose landscaped grounds were complete with sumptuous swimming pool and private zoo, were patrolled by machine-gun‒toting guards.
Even the president’s closest aides had little idea what was really going through his head, since he maintained the icy, emotionless exterior that had served him well since he first took power. As later recounted by his press secretary, Batista’s habits were becoming more compulsive. He abandoned the larger matters of state to minions and obsessed over minutiae, pondering for hours the correct punctuation of private letters or standing in front of a mirror tying and retying his Italian silk neckties. Foreign reporters were still told that Batista had a seventeen-hour workday, but the reality was the opposite: he spent most of his time listening to the taped telephone conversations of both enemies and friends, trying to glean a deeper meaning; sometimes his assistants read out the juicier parts of transcripts concerning the private lives of politicians, which they called “the novel.” Servants saw the dictator eat huge meals, then quietly go into the garden, where he would vomit behind a tree in quick explosions. Horror movies remained his favorite distraction, with Boris Karloff and Dracula now almost on a perpetual loop. No matter how Cuba’s crisis deepened, he continued to invite acquaintances to Kuquine every Sunday night to play canasta. Although the sums were small, $10 to $50, Batista would cheat; waiters tipped him off with secret signals, as in The Sting. These games often went on for hours while crucial military decisions were put on hold. Indeed, his press secretary later said bitterly that Fidel’s greatest ally was canasta.
Despite the anarchy in eastern Cuba, money continued to flood in to Batista’s private coffers. Meyer Lansky’s men dropped off a briefcase bulging with Mob cash every Monday at noon, with the dictator’s cut from casinos, bars, and brothels now $1,280,000 monthly. (Nobody has ever confirmed Batista’s true wealth squirreled away offshore in Miami and Zurich banks, but it has been estimated at between $200 and $300 million.) Of course, his expenses were also enormous: $450,000 monthly was earmarked for “publicity” alone. Every week brown envelopes would flitter through Havana bulging with bribes for local journalists. Batista was now existing in a fantasy world, cushioned from reality by his own censorship laws. Even his army officers would hide the truth from him. He had followed the summer offensive on an antique map that had blank spaces in the Sierra Maestra—aides had difficulty at first convincing him that anyone even lived in the remote mountains—and in a sense had never taken Fidel and his young upstarts seriously. So long as his tanks were amassed in Camp Columbia, the dictator felt safe; he worried more about a palace coup than the insurgency.
A sudden reality check was provided on the night of December 17 when Batista agreed to a secret meeting with one of his most loyal supporters, the US ambassador, Earl Smith. After the first winter rain storm, Smith arrived by limousine in Kuquine and was led into the library. This was where the dictator still liked to meet official guests amongst tacky marble busts of his heroes—along with Ben Franklin, Gandhi, and Joan of Arc, Smith recalled seeing Churchill, Dante, and Field Marshal Montgomery—each one on an individual pedestal. (Of course, Abraham Lincoln was still Batista’s idol; Vice President Nixon had even once toasted him as Abe’s modern successor.) A rare 1822 edition of Napoleon’s memoirs stood on its own table.
Over the previous few months, Smith had done everything he could to help Batista, lobbying the State Department to restart arms shipments and denouncing Fidel as a Communist. To his frustration, the dictator had made himself more abhorrent by the day, refusing to consider reforms or curtail his police. Now Smith had been instructed to say that the US could no longer support Batista or his puppet successor, Andrés Rivero Agüero, who was regarded by Cubans with derision. In his memoirs, Smith recalled that he tried to break the news gently, rattling on about how great a friend Batista had been to the US over the years. It was “like applying the Vaseline before inserting the stick.” Then Smith broke the bad news, adding that Washington “would view with skepticism” the idea of Batista continuing to live in Cuba. Smith thought he heard Batista’s breath change, letting out a wheeze “like a man who was hurt.” Even worse, retirement to Daytona Beach was no longer an option. Spain would be better. Washington could not force Batista to resign but had given him a serious push.
A few days later, Batista told his trusted military liaison officer that he wanted to draw up a list of who should be alerted “in case we have to leave Cuba.” The young man, Brigadier General Francisco “Sillito” Tabernilla, the son of the armed forces chief, was stunned. “Why don’t we fight to the last man?” he asked. After all, the rebels still only controlled a small portion of the island, and not a single city.
“Sillito,” Batista sighed, averting his eyes. “That’s not possible.”
Three DC-4s were put on constant standby at his sprawling main base and command center Camp Columbia on the western edge of the city. Pacing back and forth in his office beneath photos of his greatest successes, Batista dictated a string of names from memory. It was crucial that the list be kept secret, he stressed. Any word that the president was even considering escape would lead to a total collapse. On his way out, Batista gave Sillito a brown paper envelope. “This is for you,” he smiled. It contained $15,000 cash.
CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY for M-26-7. On December 23 a major sugar company with strong ties to Batista decided to hedge its bets and pay Fidel’s “war tax.” In Havana’s colonial Old Town, a lawyer with Movement ties was ushered into an elegant office, where an elderly executive was waiting at a desk piled with 100 peso notes. After the April strike, the rebels had only mustered $700 in monthly donations in the entire capital. In November they had received $30,000. Now the lawyer was being offered $450,000 in one drop. Making this “contribution,” the executive said carefully, “was the right thing to do at the right time.” He then asked for a receipt.
For other habaneros, the next night, Nochebuena, or Christmas Eve, went ahead with an eerie sense of normalcy. The Tropicana nightclub offered a dinner choice of all-American stuffed turkey with cranberry sauce or Cuban roast suckling pig. Newspapers were filled with positive news—“Rural Outlaws Express Regret for Taking up Arms”—while the New York Times had recently run a story by Ruby Hart Phillips on the upcoming winter tourist season that might have been penned by the Cuban chamber of commerce. Frank Sinatra and assorted Hollywood moguls were financing a new hospitality concept for Havana, an all-inclusive resort called the Monte Carlo, with 656 hotel rooms, a private marina, interior canals, a golf course, and helicopter pads.
In Santiago, cut off from all transport by the guerrillas, the mood was more somber. At dusk, a giant red-and-black M-26-7 flag was unfurled over a nearby hill, and residents came out to stare. Rumors spread of an imminent rebel assault. Fidel and Celia felt so secure in the countryside that they traveled to Birán to spend Christmas Day with Fidel’s mother, Lina, and his older brother, a farmer who sat out the war. Señora Castro burst into tears when she first saw her illustrious son, who had brought $1,000 to pay for a feast for local villagers. “Oh, what a party we had that night!” she recalled.
The season was more dramatic for Camilo. His advance had ground to a halt before a barracks in Yaguajay, an otherwise nondescript provincial town on the edge of a coastal swamp. As a Chinese-Cuban officer and his men held out day after day against his sixty men, Camilo became so frustrated that he designed a “war machine” that seemed inspired by his favorite novel, Don Quixote.
Nicknamed “Dragón I,” it has gone down as one of the great guerrilla brainstorms. A fourteen-ton Caterpillar tractor was encrusted by local handymen with sandbags and metal plates. Two heavy machine guns were mounted on the sides along with the pièce de resistance, an improvised “flamethrower” made from a fumigation spray gun that shot a cocktail of motor oil and petrol. The lumbering assault vehicle was a cross between a World War One tank and a siege engine from the Dark Ages. (Its impressive name “quite contradicted its rather rudimentary design,” noted Aleida March when she saw it.) Driven by three men, Dragón I enjoyed mixed results. On its first surprise attack at 4:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve, it sprayed flames for thirty feet—an intimidating sight in the darkness that reportedly caused teenage soldiers to scream, “It’s a monster! The monster is coming!” After heavy fire forced its retreat, it returned with reinforced armor on Christmas Day. This time, the Dragón turned too sharply and its engine stalled. The soldiers then scored a direct hit on it with a bazooka; the drivers were unhurt but forced to reverse to safety.
Dragón I’s main impact was psychological, adding to the usual torments by loudspeaker. For their Christmas broadcast at Yaguajay, rebels smacked their lips and gloated over the food they had seized from air force parachute drops: “We are eating your holiday dinner and loving it. What’s this? A leg of lamb? And here is some rice. And black beans. And roast pork. And look what we have here for dessert!” (The hungry soldiers, meanwhile, were surrounded by “the odors of stale sweat, death and feces,” since they were trapped with overflowing latrines and decaying corpses.) The siege dragged on, until the madam of the town brothel even promised a free night for the rebels if they would capture the barracks. It would take another week for the army commander, Captain Alfredo Abon Lee, to surrender. There is no record of anyone designing a Dragón II.
BATISTA WATCHED HORROR movies; Camilo created his mechanized monster; Fidel prepared to besiege Santiago. But the fate of Cuba, it turned out, would be decided by Che. After bursting out of the Escambray Mountains, he descended on Santa Clara—a flat, featureless provincial city that was strategically placed at the island’s geographical center and the hub of its transport network. If Santa Clara fell, Cuba would be cut in two. But it was an enormous “if.” Che had only 340 men, including a few wild card DR veterans like William Morgan; his only heavy weapon was a single bazooka. They were going up against 3,500 soldiers with a dozen tanks entrenched in a city of 150,000 people, ten times larger than any the guerrillas had ever taken. Che seems not to have given it a second thought. In fact, instead of attacking by night, he decided to fight in broad daylight.
At dawn on December 27, Che arrived at the local university and declared that it would be his HQ; he was guided by the santaclareña Aleida, who had studied at the same campus. A geography professor provided city maps. According to Che’s biographer Jon Lee Anderson, Aleida’s college friend Lolita and her father arrived to welcome the guerrillas but were shocked to find how “dirty and messed up” they were. The pungent Che was even nursing a broken arm; he had tripped over a fence while trying to avoid a B-26 bombing, and now carried it in a black sling made from Aleida’s scarf. Lolita’s father whispered: “These guys are going to take Santa Clara?” One young rebel asked the pair how many troops were amassed against them. Lolita guessed there might be as many as 5,000. The rebel shrugged at the odds: “Good, with our jefe that’s no problem.”
They fought for Santa Clara block by block. By radio Che appealed for help from the citizens, asking them to overturn cars in the streets as barricades. He ordered his men to infiltrate the most densely populated neighborhoods, which limited the army tanks’ movements and range, as the gunners tried not to hit civilians. (The air force was less discriminate, bombing and strafing the population randomly.) Locals took up the rebel cause, tossing Molotov cocktails from their windows and opening their doors so guerrillas could duck to safety. As the battle raged, the wounded began to pour into the field hospitals, civilian, military, and rebel. A classic “Che moment” occurred when he visited one clinic and recognized a young recruit on his deathbed. A few days earlier Che had stripped him of his rifle for accidentally firing off a round, and told him (“in my usual dry way”) to “head back to the front lines and find yourself another gun . . . if you are up to it.” Now the man proudly told Che that he had rejoined the fight. The pair had a short conversation. “A few minutes later, he died, and it seemed to me that he was happy to have showed his bravery,” Che intoned. “Such was our Rebel Army.”
ONCE AGAIN A single creative action by the guerrillas would produce outsized results. Early on December 29, Che commandeered two yellow tractors from the university agriculture department and sent them to tear up the railroad tracks running through the center of town. (Aleida, whose job it was to locate the vehicles, recalled an absurdist moment when Che used the English name Caterpillar to describe the vehicles—she thought he said in Spanish, catres, palas y pilas, beds, shovels, and batteries. The confusion was only cleared up when he looked at her notebook. The phrase catres, palas y pilas became a running joke between them from that moment on.)
The target was the army’s fabled Tren Blindado (“Armored Train”), a twenty-two-carriage rolling fortress filled with weapons and ammunition. For the last two months the supply train had been thundering between military flash points around Cuba like a creation out of Jules Verne. When Che sent El Vaquerito and his elite “suicide squad” to attack the railway depot, panicked soldiers piled into the supposedly invulnerable citadel-on-wheels and left at high speed—straight into Che’s trap. The locomotive and the first three cars overturned in a chaos of twisted metal and shrieking soldiers; the survivors found themselves pinned down by a handful of guerrilla snipers, who then tossed petrol bombs into the carriages. “The train became, thanks to the armored plating, a veritable oven for the soldiers,” Che wrote with his usual clinical detachment. The entire force of over three hundred surrendered. To the awestruck rebels, each carriage was an Aladdin’s Cave of military gear, overflowing with shiny bazookas, antiaircraft guns, and a million rounds of ammunition, much of it still in original factory crates marked U.S. ARMY. For the first time, the guerrillas had more hardware than they could possibly use. Once again the psychological blow was the most resounding part of the victory. The capture of the Armored Train seemed to symbolize the entire war, with a clumsy relic from another era rendered useless in one clean stroke. A sense of imminent disaster began to ripple from Santa Clara to the higher army echelons around Cuba.
Even so, bitter fighting plowed on, street by street, for the next two days. The battle was filled with tragic scenes. On December 30, Che and Aleida were both stopped in their tracks when they saw El Vaquerito being carried by four friends, his long hair dripping blood. He had been running over rooftops to seize a police station when a sniper hit him in the forehead. Che ordered him to be taken straight to the clinic. “I asked Che if he was dying,” Aleida recalled, “because the poor young man was having convulsions.” He was still breathing and had a faint pulse, but Che knew there was no chance of recovery. He cursed: “They have killed me a hundred men.”
It was now, surrounded by bloodshed and tragedy, that Che realized he was in love with Aleida. When she had to dash across a street exposed to fire from an armored car, he was stricken with fear until he located her again. Che told her his feelings during a rare private second. (“Of course,” she noted, “that was hardly the ideal moment for such a confession.”) It is perhaps no coincidence that Che gave Aleida her first rifle in Santa Clara: an M1 Garand, the revolutionary equivalent of an engagement ring.
CAUGHT IN THIS helter-skelter struggle were a number of Cuban business travelers who had the bad luck to be passing through Santa Clara for the holiday season. One nail-biting drama occurred at the historic Gran Hotel on the leafy central plaza, which was seized by the military for its commanding views over the downtown area. Ten SIM snipers had stationed themselves in the tenth-floor penthouse and were holding down movement for blocks around. They had also destroyed the elevator and jammed furniture in the fifth-floor stairwell, trapping dozens of hotel guests. While the fighting dragged on below, some played poker; others gathered in the bar and drank in silence; a teenage clerk named Guillermo Domenech rationed out the last food. After dark on December 31, a call arrived from a rebel lieutenant saying he was in the lobby and needed help to reach the snipers. He asked the guests to quietly remove the furniture in the stairwell or he would have to burn it.
Neither option worked. The furniture was wedged tight, and all the fire did was fill the hotel with smoke. The manager worried that the SIM men might now use the guests as human shields to escape. The hotel electrician then had an inspiration. He remembered that one of the fifth-floor rooms opened within five feet of a cinema next door; he gambled that if he stood on the air-conditioning unit, he might jump the remaining distance. The foothold stayed firm: he was able to kick in a cinema window and make it across the fifty-foot drop above a concrete back alley. In hushed silence, guests lined up to sit on the AC unit to be pulled across, starting with the manager’s Rubenesque mother-in-law. (“If the A-C can hold her, we will have no problem with anyone,” the clerk Domenech muttered uncharitably to a chorizo salesman.) A sleeping baby was also passed across, wrapped in a blanket. The young clerk was one of the last to leave: finding himself in the cinema’s projection room, he ran into a smiling barbudo, the first rebel he had ever met.
Suddenly everyone realized it was New Year’s Eve. It was time to celebrate.