I guess really good soldiers are really good at very little else . . .
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
TODAY IT’S NOT hard to see why the Comandancia de La Plata was never found by Batista’s patrols. Getting to the guerrilla HQ still feels like a covert mission. The Sierra Maestra remains free of road signs, so I had to ask for directions from passing campesinos on horseback while zigzagging between wandering livestock and potholes that could swallow a Cadillac. In the hamlet of Santo Domingo, an official guide filled out paperwork in quadruplicate to secure access permits before ushering me into a creaky state-owned four-wheel-drive van. The vehicle proceeded to wheeze its way up roads at gradients so steep, it felt like a cable car should be installed.
The guide, Omar Pérez, then took me along a steep hiking trail ascending for a mile into the tropical forest. Rains had turned stretches into muddy streams, and the intense humidity had us soaked with sweat after only a few steps. A spry local farmer, Pérez pushed ahead with exhortations of “¡Vámanos, muchachos! ¡Adelante!” like Fidel at the Moncada. By the time I spotted Che’s field hospital, I looked like a half-wild guerrilla myself.
In any other country, the Comandancia might have made an excellent eco-lodge, but in Cuba it has been maintained as the revolution’s most intimate shrine. Despite repairs for hurricane damage over the decades, the sixteen structures look much as they did when Fidel left in November 1958, each one lovingly labeled with a wooden sign. Paths lead past the Press Office and the Marianas’ cabins to the summit, where the Radio Rebelde hut still contains original transmitters and the antenna that was raised and lowered by hand.
The main attraction, La Casa de Fidel, the cabin designed by Celia, still looks as if the revolutionary power couple have just popped out for a cigar. The large windows remain propped open to let in the cool breeze and the sound of the stream tinkling below. Their gasoline-fueled refrigerator is there in the kitchen, complete with bullet holes. The only change is in the bedroom, where the couple’s original mattress is now covered in thick protective plastic. It’s not permitted to enter the cabin, but when Pérez meandered off, I climbed the ladder and slipped inside unseen. I lay down on the bed to channel 1958, gazing up at a window still filled with flowers and foliage.
But even the hallowed Comandancia is now enveloped by a sense of broken dreams. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba fell into an economic crisis from which it has still not escaped; although the socialist system is slowly being modified, it remains isolated by the US trade embargo, a last fragment of the Cold War adrift in the tropics. As we hiked back down the mountain, Peréz explained that he had landed his job as a tourist guide in part because his grandfather had helped the rebels and knew them personally. Although he has a university degree in agricultural engineering, he made far more from foreign travelers than he could on a state-run farm—14 CUC (US $16) a month, but bolstered, he added pointedly, by propinitas, “little tips.”
All over Cuba, the memory of the revolutionary war is very much alive: everywhere the guerrillas went has a lavish memorial or a quasi-religious museum offering artifacts like Che’s beret, Camilo’s tommy gun, or leftover Molotov cocktails—not to mention oddities such as the darned socks, hair combs, and the toothbrushes of vanished heroes. Even the more cynical younger generation likes to remain on a first-name basis with the rebels. Cubans remain extremely proud of the uprising’s against-all-odds victories as well as revolutionary achievements such as creating free education and health care systems that rival the finest in the First World.
But the idealistic aura has become almost painfully poignant as the socialist system decays, and the shrines are less and less visited. Hardly anyone tracks down Haydée’s small apartment in Havana where the chicos plotted the Moncada attack, or the prison cell on the Isle of Pines (now called the Isle of Youth) where the rebels’ beds are lined up beneath faded photo portraits. Even fewer find Frank País’s family home in Santiago, where the gramophone that once played jazz to drown out subversive conversation still sits in his bedroom.
Perhaps the most forlorn memorial of all is where the drama began in 1956, the Granma “invasion” site. The coastline near Playa las Coloradas is still so pristine that it is part of a national park, although in the 1970s, a 1,300-yard concrete walkway was laid across the mangroves to reach the exact landing spot. When I arrived, the lone guide could not hide her surprise: she averaged one visitor per week. A jovial woman with a PhD in history, she led me along the sun-blasted path as crabs scuttled underfoot. Every year on December 2, the anniversary of the landing is celebrated here with the singing of anthems and “acts of political solidarity,” she said. The highlight is when eighty-two young men and women chosen for their patriotic bona fides jump out of a Granma replica and reenact the rebels’ arrival. “But we don’t force them to wade through the swamp,” she confided.
OLD REVOLUTIONARIES DON’T quietly fade away. The subsequent stories of almost everyone involved in the Cuban uprising are filled with operatic drama:
The first tragedy occurred in October 1959 when the idolized, wisecracking Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos vanished at sea in a Cessna flying to Havana. When the news broke, Cubans burst into tears in the street, and the memory still causes anguish among older citizens. Parts of the plane were recovered and the reason for the crash was almost certainly mechanical failure, but this has never been proven, leading to conspiracy theories that Fidel was behind it. Today, Camilo’s swaggering image, his smile extending from ear to ear, is still emblazoned all over Cuba, although few foreigners recognize him.
Che Guevara and Aleida March were married in June 1959—photos show Che beaming maniacally at the camera—and had four children in quick succession. But he became increasingly impatient with domestic life and the demands of his desk jobs. First he set off on a guerrilla venture to the Congo. Then, in 1967, with a shaved head, false teeth, and horn-rimmed glasses, he slipped into Bolivia and tried to foment revolution in the dirt-poor Andes. The peasants were indifferent; after a manhunt that continued for months, he was captured by CIA-backed troops on the verge of starvation. The last photographs of Che are shocking: the Adonis-like hero of the Sierra Maestra looks a ruin, with long matted hair and a haunted, vacant expression. He was executed on October 9. His last words to the man who volunteered for the job were, “I know you are here to finish me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.” He was thirty-nine years old. Ironically, the officers who tracked him down had very likely read his book Guerrilla Warfare, which their CIA trainers used for reference.
Che’s martyrdom guaranteed his fate as an international superstar. Shortly before he died, the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda gave a portrait called Guerrillero Heroico (The Heroic Guerrilla) to a left-wing Italian businessman who was visiting Havana. The image of Che staring beatifically into the distance was soon reproduced in Europe as a silkscreened poster and has become one of the modern era’s most reproduced images. (Korda liked to complain that he never received a centavo in royalties.)
In 2005, Che’s remains were rediscovered in a mass grave in Bolivia and sent back to Cuba, where they were interred with much fanfare in Santa Clara, the site of his greatest military success. The mausoleum is now guarded by cadres of young women dressed in khaki miniskirts and aviator sunglasses, who loll about by the eternal flame like Che groupies. An attached museum offers some poignant exhibits from Che’s childhood in Argentina, including his leather asthma inhaler and copies of schoolbooks “read by young Ernesto.” They include Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, and Don Quixote. Fifteen years after his death, Aleida became director of the Center for Che Guevara Studies in Havana “to promote the study and understanding of Che’s thought.” Their four children are active in progressive social causes in Cuba and abroad.
Although their romance faded, Celia Sánchez remained for two decades Fidel’s most trusted confidante. Her Havana apartment on Calle Once became, in Carlos Franqui’s words, the comandante en jefe’s “home, office, and working quarters,” and she traveled with him to every important engagement. Celia personally received campesino visitors from the sierras in need of aid—they would often come straight from the bus station—making her one of the most beloved figures of the revolution. In 1964 she also realized her dream of setting up an archive, the Office of Historical Affairs, filled with the documents she saved in the guerrilla war. By the late 1970s her constant workload and chain-smoking led to a diagnosis of lung cancer. After she died on January 11, 1980, at the age of fifty-nine, the nation went into mourning. In scenes reminiscent of the passing of Evita Perón, thousands traveled from around Cuba for the funeral, and Fidel stayed up all night as she lay in state. A family friend reported: “When you see any man cry, it is very impressive, but to see Fidel Castro cry . . . He was very red, like a pomegranate. And tears flowed down both sides of his face.” The funeral procession was led by a giant wreath covered with orchids, bearing the words: “For Celia from Fidel.” He never spoke about her publicly.
No sooner had Batista fled than Haydée Santamaría abandoned the Miami she loathed for Havana. Within four months she had set up the Casa de las Américas, a cultural center that promoted exchange around Latin America, with its own publishing house, concert halls, and literary prizes. But she continued to be plagued by the depression that had deepened with the murder of her fiancé and brother years before. In an open letter sent to Che after his death, she wrote: “I think that I have already lived too much. The sun is not as beautiful, I don’t feel pleasure in seeing the palm trees. Sometimes, like now, in spite of enjoying life so much, knowing that it is worth opening one’s eyes every morning . . . I have the desire to keep them closed, like you.” Not long after Celia’s death in 1980, she took a pistol and killed herself—on July 26, the anniversary of the Moncada. She was fifty-seven.
Most other members of the Movement had more cheerful lives. Juan Almeida, the former construction worker and lovelorn poet from Havana, maintained a leading role in the armed forces from 1959. He wrote a string of memoirs and poetry volumes, and became one of the world’s few military leaders to have hit love songs to his name, including “Dame un traguito” (“Give Me a Drink”), “Mejor Concluir” (“We’d Better Part”), and “Déjale que Baile Sola” (“Let Her Dance Alone”). Almeida died in 2009 at the age of eighty-two.
Haydée’s compañera at the Moncada, the lawyer Melba Hernández, kept a lower profile but held a string of government posts, including managing the prison system and serving as president of the Pro-Vietnam Committee. She died in 2014, age eighty-two.
Vilma Espín remained in the inner circle of government her whole life. She was a tireless promoter of women’s rights—“the revolution within the revolution”—bringing women into the workforce and creating childcare centers across Cuba. She also backed a controversial law in 1975 that forced men and women to share housework fifty-fifty. After Celia’s death, she became the unofficial first lady of Cuba, accompanying Fidel on many overseas trips. She had four children with Raúl, although their marriage was volatile and there were reports that they had secretly divorced. She died in 2007, age seventy-seven.
The self-taught journalist who had been born in a cane field, Carlos Franqui, became the first editor of Revolución, which allowed him to travel widely in Europe and hobnob with Picasso, Miró, and Calder. Within Cuba, he was friends with the greatest artists of the era, including the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante and the painter Wifredo Lam. He left Cuba in the mid-1960s and finally broke with Fidel over his support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. As his criticism became more vocal—and his recollections became more fanciful—Franqui was accused of being a CIA agent and airbrushed out of many early photographs of the guerrilla war, inspiring him to respond with a poem:
I discover my photographic death.
Do I exist?
I am a little black,
I am a little white,
I am a little shit,
On Fidel’s vest.
Franqui died in 2010, aged eighty-eight.
The socialite-rebel Naty Revuelta briefly allowed herself to dream that she might become the first lady of the new Cuba. Soon after the victory, Fidel came to visit her in her mansion and met his young daughter Alina, then a toddler, but explained that marriage to an aristocratic woman was impossible in the new society he was creating. Still, the visits made her surgeon husband suspicious, and in 1961 the couple divorced and he left for Miami. Naty remained in Cuba and became an exemplary revolutionary, joining labor brigades, spurning the black market, and working in government offices. She died in 2015, age eighty-nine.
THE FATES OF the more nefarious figures in the story were no less dramatic. For a quarter century after his ignominious exit, Fulgencio Batista became the epitome of a disgraced ex-dictator, drifting in comfortable exile with the fortune he had pillaged from Cuba. He lived in an opulent hotel on Portugal’s island of Madeira surrounded by watchful bodyguards and writing five self-serving memoirs, then moved to the seaside in Franco’s Spain, where he brokered real estate deals in cheesy resorts on the Costa del Sol. Although he always feared an assassin’s bullet, he died there of a heart attack on August 6, 1973, at age seventy-two.
Many of Batista’s most vicious minions lived to ripe old ages in Miami, including the psychopathic Havana police chief, Esteban Ventura, “the assassin in the white suit,” who used his skills to found a successful security firm and died quietly in his bed in 2001 at age eighty-seven. The bloodthirsty leader of the Tigers, Rolando Masferrer, became involved in a string of anti-Castro plots in Florida, and even funded his own newspaper, Libertad. In October 1975 he wrote that bombing and assassination were legitimate political tools and—in poetic justice—was killed by a car bomb a week later. The murder is still unsolved.
The American Mafiosi did not last long in Havana. The US-run casinos and hotels were nationalized in October 1960, ending Meyer Lansky’s dreams of a Caribbean Monte Carlo. His succinct verdict was: “I crapped out.” The “Jewish godfather” continued to be hounded by the FBI but was never prosecuted. When he died in Miami in 1982 at age eighty-two, his personal fortune was found to be a modest $57,000. The dead-eyed gangster Santo Trafficante Jr., who owned the Capri Hotel, had the roughest exit from Havana. He spent months in a detention center on the Malecón in 1960; convinced he was on the execution list, he bribed his way out. His name would recur in US mob prosecutions until he died of a heart attack in 1987, age seventy-two.
The Tropicana nightclub was also nationalized, even though it had put on a floor show in mid-1959 called “Canto a Oriente,” “Song for the Oriente,” which sung the praises of Fidel’s land reform law. Today the cabaret is still performed for tourists and hordes of jineteras, female hustlers.
SYMPATHETIC AMERICANS CAUGHT up in the revolution were almost destroyed by the association. Herbert L. Matthews was one of a dozen American journalists presented with gold medals by Fidel during his 1959 visit to Washington. Within a year he would be derided as a Communist dupe and pilloried by the conservative press. Bitter and frustrated, he retired to live with his son in Adelaide, Australia, although he continued to defend his famous 1957 scoop from the Sierra Maestra. He died in 1977 at age seventy-seven. Another of Fidel’s gold medalists, Jules Dubois, wrote a quick book praising Fidel in 1959 but later recanted; he died of an unexpected heart attack in 1966 at the age of fifty-five. The only woman in the press group, war photographer Dickey Chapelle also went back on her initial, cautious enthusiasm for the revolution by the time she wrote her disarmingly frank 1962 memoir, What’s a Woman Doing Here?: A Combat Reporter’s Report on Herself. She continued working with the Marines and went on assignment in Vietnam, where she was killed by shrapnel from a booby trap in 1965. She was forty-five years old.
Ed Sullivan was equally embarrassed by his positive TV coverage of Fidel and said that he regretted comparing him to George Washington. Still, he liked the interview enough to include it on his “best of” fifteenth anniversary special in 1963. Sullivan was never elevated to the ranks of CBS foreign correspondents; his boss Ed Murrow found the idea ludicrous. His variety show lasted until 1971.
Robert Taber, the bank robber turned reporter, became one of the revolution’s most persistent American supporters. He wrote books on M-26-7 and guerrilla warfare and translated Fidel’s classic pamphlet, History Will Absolve Me, into English. Returning to New York in 1960, he became alarmed by the plans openly being laid for a US-backed invasion of Cuba. He and his CBS coworker Richard Gibson formed the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and ran (apparently with Cuban funding) a full-page open letter supporting Fidel in the New York Times, signed by such luminaries as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. CBS soon forced Taber and Gibson to resign.
Trading in his pen for a machine gun, Taber fought on the Cuban side at the Bay of Pigs and was badly wounded. Two years later, disillusioned with both the US and Cuba, he slipped out of a communist conference in Czechoslovakia by hiking into Austria. He was brought before Senate Committees after the assassination of JFK. (It had turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a member of the FPCC, and wild accusations flew that the pair had met in Havana.) Taber’s career as a journalist was seriously affected for the rest of his life, and at one stage the only work he could get was as a copy editor at the Bergen County Record of Hackensack, New Jersey. He retreated to Maine and refused repeated requests for interviews. He died peacefully in his sleep at age seventy-six in 1995. “It’s not what you would have betted the end of his life would be,” said his son Peter.
OF THE AMERICAN soldiers of fortune, the luckiest managed to get out of Cuba within a year or two. The loudmouthed Don Soldini had a small cameo on The Jack Paar Tonight Show with Fidel when it was taped in the Havana Hilton in January 1959; he ended up a successful businessman in Fort Lauderdale and was interviewed by the Miami Herald a quarter century later driving a Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible. Neill Macaulay stayed in Pinar del RÍo for several months, helping to train firing squads, although with much less relish than Herman Marks. (Macaulay refused to give the order to fire, he said.) He successfully raised tomatoes for a season but returned home when export controls were tightened in 1961. As professor of Latin American history at the University of Florida, he authored his Cuban war memoir and a string of well-received books.
The three runaway teenage “Navy brats” from Guantánamo who joined Fidel all eventually enlisted in the US military. The youngest, Victor Buehlman, had watched the rebel victory on TV while in high school in Jacksonville, Florida. He somehow managed to call the Havana Hilton and get Camilo on the line, who told him to come on down and “join the party.” (“I couldn’t,” he lamented. “I didn’t have any money. I was just a kid.”) Chuck Ryan was sent to New York in 1958 to speak at M-26-7 fund-raisers, but he soon dropped out. He did a tour of duty in Vietnam in 1966. The third, Mike Garvey, became a paratrooper; during the 1962 Missile Crisis, he was worried that he would be sent to Cuba and forced to fight his old guerrilla comrades.
The trio lost touch until 1996, when CBS reporters tracked them down and Fidel invited them to Havana as his personal guests at his seventieth birthday party. Ryan and Garvey accepted. (Buehlman had by then become violently anti-Castro.) They reminisced with the Maximum Leader for over five hours. Afterward, the three American veterans had their life stories optioned for a film titled The Boys from Guantánamo. Buehlman died in 2010, Ryan in 2012. The film has yet to be made.
The “Yankee comandante” William Morgan reveled in US press coverage after the 1959 victory and became one of Fidel’s confidants when he worked as a double agent to expose a coup plot organized from the Dominican Republic. Electing to stay in Cuba and run a frog farm with Olga, he became increasingly disenchanted with Fidel’s left-wing leanings. In late 1960 Cubans charged him with running guns to the CIA-backed rebels in his old haunt, the Escambray Mountains. Although he protested his innocence, Morgan was executed at La Cabaña on the night of March 11, 1961, in a gruesome scene: when he refused to kneel, he was shot in both knees and left to squirm in agony before his body was riddled with bullets. Olga was also arrested, and spent ten years in prison before being released to live in Morgan’s hometown of Toledo, Ohio.
By then, executions were no longer being run by the malevolent American ex-con Herman Marks: “the Butcher” was already off the scene. In May 1960, stories of his vile treatment of prisoners—some were allegedly bayoneted to death—led Fidel to transfer him to the Isle of Pines; he escaped on a fishing boat with a young American freelance journalist he had seduced, traveling to Mexico and then illegally back into the US. There he fought for several years to avoid deportation on the grounds that he would be killed in Cuba. In the mid-1960s he disappeared from sight and is thought to have lived to old age in Florida.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY FINALLY made a public statement about the Revolution on his last visit to the island in November 1959, when Prensa Latina journalists met him at Havana airport. The FBI report says that Hemingway declared it “the best thing that had ever happened to Cuba.” Adding that he hoped he would be regarded not as a yanqui but as a Cuban, Ernesto walked over and kissed the national flag. He met Fidel only once, at a fishing tournament in 1960, and presented him with a trophy; the pair evidently talked about marlin. Hemingway left the island later that year and, ever more depressed from electric shock therapy, killed himself in Ketchum, Idaho, in July, 1961. His wife donated their house to the Cuban government to maintain as a museum; today, it is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the country, with Hem’s fishing boat, the Pilar, mounted in the former tennis court, and the pet cemetery boasting a tombstone to his beloved Black Dog.
Errol Flynn somehow managed to make his two movies in Havana. His documentary using footage of Fidel’s arrival in the capital was shown in Russia, then lost, resurfacing in a Moscow archive only in 2001. Cuban Rebel Girls was his last released feature film, with himself playing a war correspondent and Beverly Aadland as a ditzy New Yorker who becomes a guerrilla. It was panned by critics and remains difficult to watch. (“When I first got here, I didn’t know what the word ‘liberty’ meant,” Aadland’s character squeaks. “I read about it in books and stuff, but it took this trip for me to find out the meaning.”) In the last scene, Flynn gazes out over a parade from his hotel balcony. “Well, I guess this about winds up another stage in the fight to rid Latin America of tyrants, dictators,” he mumbles. “But the spirit started by this handful of wonderful rebels is spreading and growing stronger every day. And all you young men and women fighting for political freedom and your beliefs everywhere, I wish you good luck.” Flynn died a few months later, of a heart attack; he was in Vancouver, trying to sell his yacht before the IRS repossessed it. His Cuban years were dramatized in the 2013 biopic The Last of Robin Hood starring Kevin Kline as Flynn and Dakota Fanning as Aadland.
DESPITE 638 ATTEMPTS on his life, Fidel Castro went on to become the world’s longest-serving leader, outlasting ten US presidents and gaining an aura of immortality. (A Cuban joke from around 2000: Fidel is offered a Galápagos turtle as a pet but turns it down when he learns that it lives for only three centuries. “What a pity,” he says. “You just get used to a pet and it dies.”) For decade after decade, he was one of the world’s most vocal and divisive leaders, keeping Cuba in the world’s eye as he delighted in taunting the United States. But time caught up even with Fidel. Just before his eightieth birthday in 2006, he withdrew from public life after emergency surgery for intestinal bleeding and in 2008—forty-nine years after the revolution rolled into Havana—stepped down from active public office. Despite his absence, news of Fidel’s death on November 25, 2016, sent Cuba into shock. In a symbolic mirror image of his 1959 “caravan of victory,” Fidel’s ashes were taken by cavalcade from Havana back to Santiago, with crowds of tearful, flag-waving Cubans lining the way. His remains were interred in the Santa Ifigenia necropolis next to the tomb of his hero José Martí and within sight of a wall dedicated to the “martyrs of the revolution.” His tomb is a giant granite boulder with a simple metal plaque that reads: “Fidel.”
Fidel’s “relief pitcher,” Raúl Castro, emerged from the shadows when his brother first fell sick and in 2008 assumed the presidency. Three years later, Raúl ushered in far-reaching reforms to open up the Cuban economy, including legalizing private employment for nearly two hundred jobs. The restoration of diplomatic relations with the US, the easing of travel restrictions, and President Obama’s visit to Havana in 2011 led to a promising thaw in relations with the Monster of the North—but the mood of optimism quickly dissolved when President Trump took office in 2017 and moved to return Cuba to its Cold War isolation.
Fidelito grew up to be a world-respected nuclear physicist, but became depressed after his father’s death and killed himself in 2018, age sixty-eight.