Che Guevara (62 page)

Then the port of Nicaro fell to Raúl, and the La Maya barracks in Guantánamo fell when a rebel pilot dropped a napalm bomb on the compound. Raúl had also captured vast quantities of weapons and was holding more than 500 prisoners. As Fidel laid siege to Maffo in mid-December, his forces controlled most of the Central Highway through Oriente and seemed to have the army pinned down everywhere.

The CIA had begun exploring the possibility of backing a preemptive military coup, and agents were fishing around for suitable candidates for a junta. Once again, Justo Carrillo proposed Colonel Barquín, who was still imprisoned on the Isle of Pines. Barquín inspired strong loyalties within the armed forces and was on most people’s lists of a candidate to assume military control once Batista was gone. This time, the CIA gave its go-ahead, and Carrillo received money to bribe prison officials to spring Barquín.

Simultaneously, sensing an opening for themselves, Batista’s coterie of top officers began hatching coup plots. General Francisco Tabernilla, the army chief of staff, told General Cantillo, the commander of Oriente province, to open negotiations with Fidel by proposing an alliance between the military and the rebels for the final push against Batista. A junta would include Cantillo, another officer to be decided upon, the president-in-waiting Manuel Urrutia, and two civilians selected by Fidel. The unofficial slogan of all these last-ditch efforts was, of course, “Stop Castro,” and Fidel saw little reason to accommodate them. He rejected the putschists’ proposal and sent word to Cantillo that he wanted a face-to-face meeting to give
his
proposals.

Across the country, towns and cities were being occupied by the rebels. They were greeted by enthusiastic civilians, many of whom—genuine supporters or not—wore the red-and-black July 26 armband. By Christmas, Che’s and Camilo’s forces had taken most of the major towns and cities in Las Villas except for Santa Clara, Cienfuegos, Trinidad, and Yaguajay. Víctor Bordón had taken a string of towns to the west, cutting off Santa Clara from potential reinforcement from Cienfuegos or Havana. In Oriente, meanwhile, the major garrisons at Caimanera and Sagua de Támano fell; and a naval vessel, the
Máximo Gómez
, stood off Santiago awaiting the rebels’ orders to defect. After a quick Christmas visit with his mother in Birán, Fidel prepared for his meeting with Cantillo. He still had plenty of worries, but on the night of December 26 he felt confident enough to give Che the orders all in the rebel movement had dreamed of for a very long time: preparations for the assault on Havana itself.

Fidel had been correct in his end-game analysis that the battle for Las Villas was crucial. The city of Santa Clara had become the last cornerstone in Batista’s defensive strategy. As the major transportation and communications hub of central Cuba, with a population of 150,000, it was the one remaining obstacle to a rebel assault on the capital. If Santa Clara fell, only the port of Matanzas lay between the rebels and Havana. Batista beefed up the Santa Clara garrison with more than 2,000 new soldiers to bring its troop strength to 3,500. He sent his ablest soldier, Joaquín Casillas, now a colonel, to take over its defense. To support Casillas, he had dispatched an armored train, loaded with weapons, ammunition, and communications equipment; it was to serve as a reserve arsenal and mobile communications link with military headquarters at Camp Columbia.

Batista knew he had little time left. He was aware of Tabernilla’s schemes against him and had chosen to side with General Cantillo, saying he would hand over power to a junta headed by Cantillo in late January. But Batista wasn’t taking any chances; over Christmas he arranged for several
airplanes to stand ready to evacuate him and a short list of handpicked officers and friends with their families. A few days later, he sent his children to the United States for safety.

Meanwhile, Che was getting ready to attack Santa Clara. On December 27, he was joined in newly liberated Placetas by Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, a young geography professor from Santa Clara University who brought maps and diagrams to help plan Che’s approach to the city. With Ramiro Valdés, they plotted a route over back roads leading to the university, on the northeastern outskirts of the city. They set out that night, with a disparity in numbers similar to those that had marked nearly every engagement between the rebels and the Cuban army. With eight of his own platoons, and a 100-man Directorio column led by Rolando Cubela, Che had 340 fighters to tackle an enemy force ten times larger and supported by tanks and air power.

Che’s convoy arrived at the university at dawn the next day. Aleida’s friend Lolita Rossell was on hand to meet them. She was shocked by how “dirty and messed-up” the guerrillas looked. Her father, who was standing next to her, muttered incredulously: “
These
guys are planning to take Santa Clara?” Then Lolita spotted Che, and she was struck both by how young he looked and by his air of authority. This impression was bolstered when one of his men, his face a battle-weary mask, asked her how many soldiers were in the city. When she told him “about five thousand,” he nodded and said, “Good, with our
jefe
that’s no problem.”

After setting up a provisional
comandancia
at the university in Aleida’s old stomping ground, the Pedagogical Faculty, Che and his men set out for the city itself, walking in irrigation ditches along the way. Stopping at the CMQ radio station, Che went on the air to appeal to civilians for support. Shortly afterward, B-26 bombers and new British-made Sea Furies strafed and bombed the outskirts of town, looking for his fighters.

The enemy had occupied a series of well-fortified positions around the city, but Che’s first priority was the armored train, which was stationed at the entrance to the Camajuaní road leading to the university. At the eastern edge of the city, the army had occupied the strategic Capiro Hills that overlooked both the university road and the road and rail line leading out to Placetas. More than 1,000 soldiers were holed up in the Leoncio Vidal garrison in the northwestern suburbs, and nearby was police headquarters, with 400 defenders. In the city center, the courthouse, provincial government building, and jail had all been made redoubts; and to the south, the No. 31 and Los Caballitos garrisons guarded the road to Manicaragua. With most of the province now in rebel hands, Che’s chief concern was to prevent enemy reinforcements from coming by the western Havana-Matanzas
road, but Víctor Bordón’s force had already cut the highway at several points and seized the key town of Santo Domingo.

Over that night and into the morning of December 29, Che moved his forces from the university into the city, targeting all the enemy positions but concentrating on the armored train. He moved his
comandancia
to a public-works building half a mile from town and had a section of rail track pulled up with tractors. Then his men attacked, going against the police station, the Capiro Hills, and the train. At the same time, Cubela’s Directorio column, which had entered from the south the day before, laid siege to the No. 31 and Caballitos garrisons.

Over the next three days, Santa Clara became a bloody battleground as rebels slowly advanced into the city. In some places, fighters moved forward by punching holes in the interior walls of houses while others fought pitched battles in the streets outside. Numerous civilians heeded Che’s call to arms, making Molotov cocktails, providing refuge and food, and barricading their streets. As tanks fired shells and airplanes continued to bomb and rocket, both civilian and guerrilla casualties piled up in the hospitals. Che was visiting one of the hospitals when a dying man touched his arm and said to him: “Do you remember me, Commander? In Remedios you sent me to find a weapon ... and I earned it here.” Che recognized him. It was a young fighter he had disarmed days earlier for accidentally firing his rifle. Che also recalled what he had told him at the time. “I had responded with my customary dryness,” he wrote in his memoirs. “‘Go get yourself another rifle by going to the front line unarmed ... if you’re up to it.’” The man had been up to it, with fatal consequences. “He died a few minutes later, and I think he was content for having proved his courage. Such was our Rebel Army.”

On December 29, 1958, Che and his fighters derailed an armored government train in Santa Clara. It was the death knell for Batista’s regime.

The tide turned inexorably on the afternoon of December 29. After El Vaquerito’s squad took the train station and other rebels stormed the Capiro Hills, soldiers fled for the protection of the armored train, which had twenty-two cars. The train moved out at speed. When it reached the missing track, the engine and the first three cars derailed in a spectacular cataclysm of twisted metal and screaming men. “A very interesting battle began,” Che wrote, “in which the men were forced out of the train by our Molotov cocktails. ... The train became, thanks to the armored plating, a veritable oven for the soldiers. In a few hours, the whole complement surrendered with its twenty-two cars, its antiaircraft guns, its machine guns ... its fabulous quantity of ammunition (fabulous, of course, compared with our meager supply).”

With battles still raging around the city, the international wires carried the false news that evening that Che had been killed. Early the next day, Radio Rebelde went on the air, trumpeting the news of the capture of the armored train and denying Che’s death: “For the tranquillity of the relatives in South America and the Cuban population, we assure you that Ernesto Che Guevara is alive and on the firing line, and ... very soon, he will take the city of Santa Clara.”

All too soon, however, Che had to go on the air himself, confirming the death of one of his most beloved men, Roberto Rodríguez—El Vaquerito, the leader of the Suicide Squad. It lent a sad note to a broadcast made to announce the imminent fall of the city. That afternoon, he had been hit by a bullet in the head while attacking the police station. Vaquerito’s loss was especially painful to Che, for the youth had been a living personification of what he sought in his fighters. “Suicide Squad” had been Vaquerito’s choice of names, but it was an elite attack squad made up of those fighters who aspired to Che’s highest measure.

“The Suicide Squad was an example of revolutionary morale,” Che wrote, “and only selected volunteers joined it. But whenever a man died—and it happened in every battle—when the new candidate was named, those not chosen would be grief-stricken and even cry. How curious to see those seasoned and noble warriors showing their youth by their tears of despair, because they did not have the honor of being in the front line of combat and death.”

Surrounded by death, it is a normal human reaction to reach out for life, and even Che was not immune to this instinct. So it happened that in the midst of the battle for Santa Clara, he realized he was in love with Aleida. As he told her privately later, the realization occurred when she left his side to dart across a street under fire. For the few instants she was out of sight, he was in agony, not knowing if she had made it across safely. As for Aleida, she had known what she felt since the sleepless night a few weeks before when his jeep had stopped for her and she had climbed in.

On December 30, the Los Caballitos garrison surrendered to the Directorio, and some soldiers barricaded in a church also gave themselves up. Santo Domingo, which had been lost to an army counteroffensive, was recaptured by Bordón’s forces, effectively sealing the western approaches to Santa Clara. To the south, the city of Trinidad fell to the forces led by Faure Chomón. Realizing he had not completely secured Las Villas in the east, Che had dispatched Ramiro Valdés to take the town of Jatiboníco on the Central Highway, where a column of army reinforcements was attempting to break through.

With this deployment of forces and the capture of the armored train, Santa Clara was completely isolated, and an air of desperation now seized the soldiers and policemen holding out. The military high command in Havana ordered more air attacks on the city; resistance remained fierce at the garrisons and the police station; a group of men had dug in on the tenth floor of the Gran Hotel and were directing sniper fire at the rebels. But Che now had considerable extra firepower and fresh troops at his disposal. The arms seized from the armored train had truly been a bonanza: 600 rifles, 1 million bullets, scores of machine guns, a 20mm cannon, and some precious mortars and bazookas. Throughout New Year’s Eve day, one redoubt after the other fell to the rebels: first the police station, then the provincial government headquarters, followed by the courthouse and the jail, where escaping prisoners added to the confusion in the city. By the end of the day, only the No. 31 garrison, the Gran Hotel, and the main Leoncio Vidal garrison still held out.

In Oriente, Maffo had finally surrendered to Fidel’s rebels after a ten-day siege, and Fidel had immediately set his sights on Santiago. On December 28, he and General Cantillo met at the Oriente sugar mill near Palma Soriano and reached an agreement: Fidel would halt his offensive for three days, allowing Cantillo time to return to Havana and organize a military rebellion for December 31. That day, he was to arrest Batista and place the army at Fidel’s disposal.