Che Guevara (38 page)

The Guevara family was equally distraught by the news reports. The first to hear, Ernesto senior, rushed to the newsroom of
La Prensa
to ask for confirmation but was told all he could do was wait. Celia called the Associated Press and received the same reply.

As Christmas approached, the Guevara household remained plunged in gloom. Many days had gone by and there was still no word. Then a letter with a Mexican postmark arrived. It was the letter Ernesto had left with Hilda to be mailed after his departure on the
Granma
, in which he talked to his mother of death and glory. She had sent it on, and now, with incredibly bad timing, it had reached its destination. “For our family it was simply horrifying,” recalled Che’s father. “My wife read it aloud to all of us without shedding a tear. I gritted my teeth and could not understand why Ernesto had to get involved in a revolution that had nothing to do with his homeland.”

Some days later, Ernesto senior was summoned to the Argentine foreign ministry, where a cable had just come in from his cousin, the ambassador in Havana. It seemed that Ernesto was not among the dead and wounded rebels, or among the prisoners held by the Batista regime. This was good enough for Che’s father, who ran home excitedly to give the news. “That afternoon everything changed,” he wrote. “A little halo of optimism enveloped us all, and my house once again became a noisy and happy place.”

Ernesto’s father telephoned Hilda with the news, and she heard other rumors that renewed her hope that Ernesto was still alive. “I lived on that hope,” she recalled years later. Meanwhile, she went ahead with her plans
to go home to Peru and spend Christmas with her family. But as she prepared to leave, Hilda was still very distraught. “The last few days in Mexico I was so upset and worried by the lack of news clarifying Ernesto’s situation that I was unable to take care of our belongings. I gave away most things or just abandoned them.”
*
On December 17, she and ten-month-old Hilda Beatriz left Mexico for Lima.

While they awaited proof that Ernesto was alive, the Guevaras based their faith on the promising report from the Argentine embassy in Havana. Christmas came and went. Then, at around 10 P.M. on December 31, the family was preparing to celebrate the New Year when an airmail letter was pushed under the front door. It was addressed to Celia and postmarked Manzanillo, Cuba. Inside, on a single sheet of notepaper, in Ernesto’s unmistakable hand, was the following message: “Dear old folks: I am perfectly fine. I spent two and I have five left. I am still doing the same work, news is sporadic and will continue to be, but have faith that God is an Argentine. A big hug to you all, Teté.”

Teté had been Ernesto’s nickname when he was a toddler. He was letting them know that, like a cat, he had used up only two of his seven lives.
†
The champagne was uncorked and the toasts began. Then, just before midnight struck, another envelope was pushed under the door. This too was addressed to Celia. Inside was a card with a red rose printed on it and a note: “Happy New Year. TT is perfectly well.”

“This surpassed all our expectations,” Ernesto senior recalled. “The bells of the New Year rang out and all the people who had come to my house began to show their happiness. Ernesto was safe, at least for now.”

Spreading along most of Cuba’s anvil-shaped southeastern tip for a hundred miles, the Sierra Maestra range rises sharply from the Caribbean coastal shelf, forming a rugged natural barrier between it and the fertile lowlands that spread from its opposite flanks, thirty miles inland. The sierra is dominated by Cuba’s highest mountain, the 6,500-foot Pico Turquino, and in the late 1950s was also home to one of the island’s few remaining wildernesses. An indigenous rain forest, too inaccessible to be cut down, still survived.

With only a few small towns and villages, the sierra was sparsely inhabited by 60,000 or so hardscrabble
guajiros:
the poor, illiterate black, white, and mulatto peasants whose beaten-up straw hats, gnarled bare feet, and unintelligible, devoweled, rapid-fire Spanish vernacular had made them a butt of derisory jokes among Cuba’s urban middle class.
Guajiro
meant someone stupid, a half-witted hillbilly. Some of the
guajiros
were tenant farmers, but many were illegal squatters, or
precaristas
, who had built their own dirt-floor huts, cleared a patch of land, and scratched out a living as subsistence farmers, honey collectors, or charcoal burners. Like the rest of Cuba’s rural peasantry, the
guajiros
earned cash by working as sugarcane cutters on the llano during the
zafra
, or harvest season, or as cowboys on the cattle ranches. Some enterprising souls grew marijuana illegally and used a series of smuggling trails to evade the
guardia
and get it to market. A few logging companies had concessions to extract timber from the forests, and there were some coffee plantations, but for the most part the sierra offered little gainful employment and had virtually no roads or schools, and practically no modern amenities. News of the outside world came by transistor radio or more commonly through a flourishing “bush telegraph” system known as “Radio Bemba.”

The starkness of the lives of the Sierra Maestra’s
guajiros
contrasted sharply with those of its landowners and, for that matter, with most of the people living in Oriente’s towns and cities: Santiago, Manzanillo, Bayamo, and Holguín. The best land in the sierra, and in the llano below, was privately owned, often by absentee landlords living in Cuba’s cities, and was administered by armed foremen called
mayorales
, whose job it was to chase off the persistent
precaristas
. These freewheeling, sometimes brutal men carried real weight in the area, and acted as a virtual second police force to the ill-trained, underpaid
guardia rurales
units based in outposts and garrisons throughout the region. Because of its remoteness and ruggedness, the Sierra Maestra was also a traditional redoubt for criminals escaping the law, and in lieu of an effective governmental writ, blood feuds and acts of vengeance were settled in the hills by machete and revolver. Exploiting the
guajiros’
poverty and fear of authority, the
guardia
used
chivatos
, or informers, to keep abreast of occurrences and to investigate crimes. In the hunt for Fidel and his men in the days immediately after the
Granma
landing, they had already deployed their
chivato
network, with devastating success.

Not surprisingly, violence frequently broke out between the
precaristas
and the
mayorales
. “Each side had its known leaders and gangs of followers,” the historian Hugh Thomas wrote. Crescencio Pérez worked as a truck driver for the sugar tycoon Julio Lobo but was also a
precarista
boss rumored to have killed several men and to have fathered eighty children. Pérez had
a huge extended family, numerous contacts, and quite a few men at his beck and call. It was to him that Celia Sánchez had gone to prepare for a civilian rebel support network in the sierra. With no love for the authorities, Pérez had placed himself, his family, and relatives such as Guillermo García—his nephew—as well as some of his workers at Fidel’s disposal.

If Fidel had any qualms about working with such a man, he didn’t show it. Restructuring his “general staff” the day after Christmas 1956, he promoted Crescencio Pérez and one of his sons to a new five-man
estado mayor
, presided over by himself as
comandante;
his bodyguard, Universo Sánchez; and Che. His brother Raúl and Juan Almeida, having shown their mettle by leading their groups out of Alegría de Pío, were made platoon leaders commanding five men each. As advance scouts, he named Ramiro Valdés, a Moncada veteran and one of Fidel’s early adherents; the newly resurrected Calixto Morales; and another man, Armando Rodríguez.

Given the recent debacle and the actual size of his force—not to mention his dubious prospects for success—Fidel’s grandiloquent handout of an officer’s rank to seven of the fifteen men with him might seem almost comic, but it was born of Fidel’s boundless faith in himself. He had lost more than two-thirds of his force and practically all his armaments and supplies, but he had reached the sierra, he had renewed his lifelines to the July 26 underground in the cities, and he now had Crescencio Pérez at his side to help familiarize him with the new terrain and to rebuild his army. He placed his new
guajiro
officer in charge of all peasant recruits, with his nephew Guillermo García as his deputy.

Indeed, Fidel was already behaving as if he were Cuba’s commander in chief. He had established a rigid hierarchy for the army he intended to lead to power, with himself situated firmly at the top. The autocratic nature he would become famous for was already visible as he fired off messages to the llano, demanding weapons and supplies from the hard-pressed urban underground while simultaneously turning his attention to bringing the sierra and its inhabitants under his domain.

For all the post-triumph revolutionary lyricism about the “noble peasantry” of the Sierra Maestra, in these early times Fidel and his men were very much on alien ground. They neither knew nor understood the hearts and minds of the locals, and they relied on Crescencio and his men to negotiate for them, often with disastrous results. In many of his early contacts with the area’s peasants, Fidel passed himself off as an army officer, gingerly feeling out where their true sympathies might lie.

Che, who worried about the danger of being trapped by the army if they remained too long in one spot, bristled at Fidel’s decision to linger. As they waited for some volunteers who were being sent by Celia Sánchez, he
wrote in his journal, “It doesn’t seem wise to me but Fidel insists on it.” Couriers came and went from Manzanillo, bringing hand grenades, dynamite, and machine-gun ammo, along with three books Che had requested: “Algebra, and a basic history of Cuba, and a basic Cuba geography.” The volunteers didn’t appear, but half a dozen new
guajiro
recruits trickled into camp, and the rebel army began to grow. The fact that
locals
were volunteering was a triumph. Finally, on December 30, Fidel decided to wait no longer and to head deeper into the mountains toward a new sanctuary.

Che’s diary entries acquired a more reassured, secure tone. Late on New Year’s Eve, a courier brought the news that an army battalion was preparing to come into the sierra after them. Che wrote, “The last day of the year was spent in instruction of the new recruits, reading some, and doing the small things of war.”

New Year’s Day 1957 brought rain and new details of the enemy’s plans. Four hundred soldiers were on their way into the mountains, and all the local garrisons had been reinforced. Guided by a local
guajiro
, the rebels continued their exhausting trek. The night of January 2 was an ordeal recorded by Che as “a slow and fatiguing march, through muddy trails, with many of the men suffering from diarrhea,” but the next day his diary had a tone of grim satisfaction: “The good news was received that Nene Jérez was badly wounded and is dying. Nene Jérez was the one who guided the soldiers to the place we were [ambushed] in la Alegría [de Pío].” By January 5 they could see the 4,000-foot-high Pico Caracas, the first of the series of jungle-covered mountains crowning the Sierra Maestra’s central spine. “The perspectives are good, because from here to La Plata is all steep and forested, ideal for defense,” Che observed.

Nine of the promised volunteers arrived from Manzanillo, and they camped in the Mulato valley on the flanks of Pico Caracas, awaiting updates on the army’s movements. Contradictory reports were coming in from their
guajiro
couriers. One said there were no soldiers in the vicinity, but another gave the alarming news that a
chivato
had gone to report their presence to a nearby garrison. On January 9, they decided to move off again, and by the next afternoon, from a new bivouac with a good vantage point, they saw that the report about the
chivatazo
had been accurate: eighteen naval marines appeared walking along the road leading from the Macías garrison, apparently heedless of any danger. But the rebels didn’t attack. They were waiting for Guillermo García—returning from a fruitless final mission to look for survivors from the
Granma
—and a food delivery, and Fidel wanted
to be well prepared before engaging the enemy in battle. Che rued the lost opportunity. “It would have been an easy target,” he wrote in his journal.

To counter government claims of their defeat and build up civilians’ confidence in their fighting capabilities—as well as to boost their own morale—the rebels needed to prove they were a force to be reckoned with. This meant launching an attack, preferably against a remote and ill-defended garrison where they could retain the element of surprise. La Plata, some small coastal barracks with reportedly few
guardias
, seemed to offer the perfect opportunity to Fidel. Che had different ideas, and he wrote in his diary on January 10, “Fidel’s plan is to carry out an ambush and escape to the forests with enough food for several days. It doesn’t seem bad to me but it’s a lot of weight [to carry]. My plan was to form a [central] camp with abundant food and [from there] send out assault troops.”

Che was also concerned about the men who could be counted on in the event of combat. “Together with the temporary casualty of Ramiro [Valdés, who had hurt his knee in a fall], there are one or two definitive casualties among the
manzanilleros
.” One had already been told he could leave after announcing—“suspiciously,” it seemed to Che—that he had tuberculosis, and a couple of the others seemed indecisive. He was also worried about the menace posed by
chivatos
, and in his journal he vowed to deal with this threat: “A lesson must be given.”

The next day, as Che had predicted, five of the
manzanilleros
opted to leave the field, but Fidel decided to press on. Their presence in the area had become too well known for them to stay put. A first goal was to kill three local
mayorales
, or plantation foremen, who, Che wrote, “were the terror of the peasants.” The three overseers worked for the Nuñez-Beattie timber and sugar company and had earned notoriety among the
guajiros
for their brutality. Killing them would earn the rebels popularity among the locals.