Fidel and eighty other Cubans, plus the Argentine doctor Che Guevara, slipped onto Las Coloradas beach in eastern Cuba on December 2, 1956, after a turbulent, hazardous trip from Mexico aboard the battered and overloaded yacht namedGranma.1 The urban resistance led by Frank País launched an uprising in Santiago in expectation of theGranma’s arrival, but the plan went awry due to the stormy weather, when the vessel reached the shore two days later. Alerted, Batista’s forces began cutting down the revolutionary guerrillas. Only twenty escaped the landing to form Fidel’s guerrilla army nucleus. Fidel, Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, Juan Almeida, Ramiro Valdés, Camilo Cienfuegos, and others trekked through cane fields and ravines into the mountains, where they depended on local people and tried desperately to reconnect with the urban underground. On Christmas Day 1956, Fidel moved higher into the mountains with a sixteen-man unit.2 This “heroic creation” was something between a triumph of the will and a miracle, not the predictable outcome of “objective conditions” or rational planning. The revolution was marked from the outset by utopian determination crossed with chance. On February 17, 1957, theNew York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews, who had written sympathetically about the anti-Franco fighters in the Spanish Civil War, found his way with his wife to the Sierra through underground connections, and interviewed Fidel. His reports were a media sensation, in the first place because Batista’s office was spreading the rumor that Fidel was dead. Fidel also managed to deceive Matthews about the actual size of his miniscule “army,” and was portrayed as a romantic revolutionary hero in the mainstream media.
The urban resistance suffered greatly. The disastrous March 13 attack on the presidential palace in Havana had decapitated the Directorio’s leadership. Not long after, on July 30, 1957, the much-admired underground leader in Santiago, Frank País, was hunted down and killed.3 Many thousands of people braved the repression in Santiago to gather for País’s funeral, demonstrating the hidden scale of popular support in the cities. The following year, a national general strike called by the M-26-7 failed to paralyze Batista’s state and deepened internal problems of morale. Che Guevara, among others, was very critical of the urban “civic resistance” movement, sharpening a strong debate between two strategies: first, the so-called foco theory of guerrilla war in which a small armed vanguard would establish a rural base in the Sierra from which to launch a war, backed with money, weapons and clandestine support networks in the cities; or second, the concept of an island-wide urban underground revolutionary movement (the Llano) employing everything from sabotage to front organizations until the moment of a climactic general strike. In early revolutionary lore, the revolution was won by the small guerrilla band in the Sierra, although in recent times the official Cuban consensus now recognizes a more balanced narrative acknowledging the role of the urban underground. Ricardo was continually underground himself, credited by historian Richard Gott with having shut down all state schools during the resistance,4 and once he was quoted suggesting, although with great respect, that Che’s theory of the Sierra vanguard was one-sided:
“I don’t like to criticize Che, but on that occasion he really didn’t know what he was talking about.”5
In our 2013 conversations Ricardo did not deny the quote, but added:
RICARDO:Che—and I myself—were both critical of some elements of the Llano leadership that were rather sectarian and generally anticommunist. Che probably was not aware of all the infighting that was going on. I entirely agreed with him regarding the role of those leaders and when we first met in 1959 we talked a lot about that and it became the basis of our friendship. As far as I know, Che was never in Havana before 1959, and his entire experience was in the Sierra.
The Sierra turned into a military sanctuary for the expanding rebel army. During one interlude Celia Sánchez described the mountain surroundings as a “paradise.” Just over two years after theGranma landing, after expanding the Sierra base, repelling Batista’s bombings and counter-offensives, and splitting the island with several rebel offensives, just as Antonio Maceo’s forces had done in 1896, on December 28, 1958, Che Guevara’s column took control of Santa Clara, where the underground was led by Enrique Oltuski, posing as a Shell Oil branch manager.6 As that New Year’s Eve ended, Batista made urgent plans to flee Havana with a handful of supporters. On January 2, 1959, the army in Santiago surrendered to Fidel’s column while the Batista regime crumbled. At the same time, Che and Camilo Cienfuegos led troops triumphantly into Havana. Fidel arrived one week later after a victory caravan across the island.
RICARDO:That December the rebel army was advancing around both Santiago and Santa Clara. The leadership of the M-26-7 underground, of which I was a member, had concluded that the collapse of any of those cities would force Batista’s downfall. We knew that inside Batista’s army there were some trying to find a way out. Batista had sent a military convoy to Santa Clara in a train that was derailed and captured by Che’s forces. We had even arranged to meet at a specific place, the FOCSA building,7 as soon as we learned of Batista’s fall, which we did early in the morning of January 1. We learned through Radio Rebelde that Batista had escaped. There were a number of armed clashes with [Rolando] Masferrer’s paramilitary group8 as the general strike continued. That scenario was anticipated.
I moved from FOCSA to the Masonic Temple, and from there we led the occupation of the various Havana universities and high schools with our student front and we also took over the police station in Havana near the Masonic Temple.
Those faithful to the Batista regime fled the country, with the help of the United States, aboard planes and boats. Some arrived in the United States without visas or passports since they had left hastily on their private yachts. That happened with members of the Batista dictatorship. Masferrer was an example. He was the boss of one of the terrorist groups, Los Tigres. A few days after the fall of Batista, Masferrer left on his personal boat and arrived in Florida completely illegally. We are talking about a real gangster. I studied his bulging file in our Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the transition government when we asked for Masferrer’s extradition.9
THE ROMANCE OF REVOLUTION: RICARDO AND MARGARITA
It was during these same ecstatic times that Ricardo met the love of his life, Margarita Perea, at the University of Havana. To me, Margarita stands in here for the countless Cuban women who contributed hugely to the successes of the Cuban Revolution even if history tends, wrongly, to record the revolution as a struggle waged mostly by men.
RICARDO:Margarita well deserves an entire book about her. We lived in the same neighborhood but didn’t know each other until we met at the university, where we both studied at the School of Philosophy and Literature. She was born in Santiago de las Vegas, a small town, south of and not far from Havana, where her mother was a schoolteacher and her father a clerk at the local court. She had some working experience as a secretary on a Cuban TV network. She was unusually well educated, with ample knowledge of literature, history, and Marxism.
She joined Juventud Socialista, the youth branch of the Cuban Communist Party. When Frank País, the main leader of the 26th of July underground, was assassinated in Santiago on July 30, 1957, a spontaneous general strike erupted there and reached Havana. Margarita was arrested on August 5 in a demonstration to promote the strike. She spent several days in the BRAC [Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities] being interrogated and subjected to psychological torture. When she left the BRAC, her former comrades in JS said it was better to have no more contacts because she was quemada, “burnt out,” registered by the police.
So then she asked me if she could join the 26th of July student section that I was leading and she worked with us from then on. From January 1959 on, she was very active in the political fighting for the revolution and the process of university reform, and taught at the Workers Faculty, which was established as part of the revolution’s Literacy Campaign [a flood of idealists to the countryside in 1961, led by three hundred thousand volunteer literacy teachers and administrators, which reduced the official illiteracy rate from 37 percent to 3.9 percent].10
Those were the beginnings of a passionate relationship sparked by the passion of the revolution itself. In life and struggle, all things seemed possible in those days. With their small child, named Margarita after her mother, the Alarcóns would eventually move to the diplomatic world of New York and the United Nations. Margarita left behind a promising career at the national art museum in Havana. In April 1980, while marching at the Peruvian Embassy in New York, Margarita suffered a fall which revealed that she was suffering from a rare condition, early onset Parkinson’s disease.
RICARDO:First she lost her career, then she was diagnosed with very severe glaucoma and came home very depressed. She was very young, in her twenties, and the doctor had to warn her that to avoid blindness she had to be on strict medication and never lift anything, not even our little baby. She didn’t go blind until Parkinson’s later attacked her eyes.
Margarita didn’t like diplomatic life at all, the cocktail parties, ceremonies, all that stuff. She only attended when it was unavoidable. The exceptions were the occasions when we socialized with diplomats who were also revolutionaries or intellectuals and she established many friendships with New Yorkers over those twelve years. Since her English was excellent, she often gave lectures on Cuban culture. Of course she had to face the travel restrictions imposed on Cuban diplomats. And we lived in a very tense atmosphere due to assassination plots and threats against me, but nothing ever appeared to intimidate her. There was no security at our small Manhattan apartment. One time, a terrorist knocked on the door and left a suspicious package. Margarita put it in the bathroom and called me at the mission. It turned out it was not a bomb, just a threat and a way to check that I lived in that particular place. The guy who brought it said it was a gift from Stokely Carmichael.
Then it was a long siege of hospitals, medical exams, and the like. In 1990 we both returned to New York, she went from the hospital to the airport. She resumed her previous activities but was limited by her deteriorated physical condition.
When they ended their New York diplomatic life in 1992, Margarita was moved into a hospital in Havana, the International Center for Neurological Rehabilitation. There for many years Ricardo spent his nights sleeping on a cot by her side, while coping by phone with diplomatic and political crises. Margarita died on February 12, 2008, twenty-eight years after the Parkinson’s diagnosis.
RICARDO:A big problem, the doctors told me, was that there was no literature on people suffering from Parkinson’s for more than twenty years, which she did. The disease advances, affecting the entire body. There were two or three moments of breathing paralysis, so she had to be in the hospital because at any moment the disease could overcome her.
After she died, an American friend told me a beautiful story. She and her little daughter were going through some papers at her home where they found a very old photo in which I appeared. They were trying unsuccessfully to identify who was that guy when the little girl interrupted to say, “Mom, I know. He is Margarita’s husband.”