Che Guevara (36 page)

Fidel still needed a boat. In late September he found a battered thirty-eight-foot motor yacht owned by Robert Erickson, an American expatriate. Erickson was willing to sell it if Fidel also bought his riverside house in the Gulf port town of Tuxpan. He asked for $40,000 for everything. The boat—the
Granma
—was neither seaworthy nor nearly large enough for his needs, but Fidel was desperate and agreed to Erickson’s terms. After making a partial down payment, he assigned several men to live in the house and oversee the
Granma
’s overhaul.

In late October, Che and Calixto moved to a more centrally located safe house in Colonia Roma. Che continued seeing Hilda on the weekends, but each time he left she knew he might not return. This uncertainty and the stress of his impending departure wore down her nerves, and she became increasingly anxious. To lift her spirits, Che told her he would try to take her to Acapulco for a short holiday.

“I had begun to be hopeful about the Acapulco trip, if only for a weekend,” wrote Hilda. “Then came the news ... that the police had broken into
the house of a Cuban woman in Lomas de Chapultepec, where Pedro Miret was staying, and that they had confiscated some weapons and arrested him. On Saturday, when Ernesto came, I told him about it. He reacted very calmly, saying only that precautions had to be doubled because the police might be watching. Early Sunday, Guajiro came. I knew right away he was nervous from the way in which he asked: ‘Where’s Che?’ I told him that Ernesto was taking a bath, whereupon he marched right into the bathroom. When Ernesto came out, still combing his hair, he said calmly: ‘It seems that the police are on the hunt, so we have to be cautious. We’re going to the interior and I probably won’t be back next weekend. Sorry, but we’ll have to leave our Acapulco trip until later.’”

Hilda became upset. She asked Ernesto if there was anything imminent about to happen. ““No, just precautions ...,’ he answered, gathering his things and not looking at me. When he finished, as he was always accustomed to doing before leaving, he went to the crib and caressed Hildita, then he turned, held me, and kissed me. Without knowing why, I trembled and drew closer to him. ... He left that weekend and did not come back.”

The discovery of Miret’s safe house meant that the organization had a traitor in its ranks. Suspicions focused on Rafael Del Pino, one of Castro’s closest friends and confidants. Of late, Del Pino had been entrusted with helping El Cuate procure and smuggle arms. But he had recently vanished and was the only person unaccounted for who had known where Miret was staying. (Subsequent Cuban investigations unearthed evidence that Del Pino had been an informant for the FBI for several years. If he didn’t do more damage, it was possibly because he had been holding out on his American handlers in exchange for more money.)

Fidel sent the men in Mexico City into new safe houses and ordered the repairs on the
Granma
to be sped up. Che and Calixto hid in a little servant’s room in the apartment where Alfonso “Poncho” Bauer Paiz lived with his family. The first night they spent there, they came dangerously close to being rearrested when a robbery in a neighbor’s apartment resulted in a door-to-door police search. Alerted beforehand, Che hid Calixto (who was black and therefore attracted attention in Mexico) underneath the mattress of the bed in their room. When the police arrived, he went out to stall them. The tactic worked, and the police left the flat without searching his room. They were safe for the moment, but the next day Calixto went off to a new hiding place, leaving Ernesto alone at Bauer Paiz’s house. He was to stay there until it was time to leave.

Fidel, meanwhile, was dealing with a number of last-minute hurdles. In recent weeks, both friends and rivals had tried to persuade him to postpone the invasion. His coordinator in Oriente, Frank País, came twice to
see him—in August and October. País was in charge of sparking off armed uprisings throughout eastern Cuba to coincide with the
Granma
’s landing, but he argued that his people weren’t ready to undertake such a grand plan. Fidel was insistent, however, and País agreed to try to do what he could. Fidel said he would send a coded message with his expedition’s landing time just before leaving Mexico.

In October, the Cuban Communist Party, the PSP, sent emissaries to meet with Fidel. Their urgent message was that conditions weren’t right for an armed struggle in Cuba, and they tried to win Fidel’s agreement to join forces in a gradual campaign of civil dissent leading up to an armed insurrection in which the PSP would also participate. He refused and told them he would go ahead with his plans but hoped the Party and its militants would support him nonetheless by carrying out uprisings when his army arrived in Cuba.

At this point, Fidel’s relations with the Cuban Communists were cordial but strained. Despite his public repudiation of any such links, he still had some close friends in the PSP, and he had allowed Marxists such as Raúl and Che into his inner circle. He discreetly maintained open lines of communication with the Party but kept a critical distance—not only to avoid negative publicity but to avoid political compromises until he was in a position of strength. Meanwhile, there was unease at the Soviet embassy resulting from the unwelcome publicity over the links between members of Castro’s group and the Instituto Cultural Ruso-Mexicano. In early November, Nikolai Leonov was recalled to Moscow, as punishment, he says, for initiating contact with the Cuban revolutionaries without prior approval.

The Communists were not alone in trying to find a place at Cuba’s insurrectionary table. As Fidel prepared to leave Mexico, a game of brinksmanship ensued with the Directorio, which jostled to take the revolutionary trump card. In spite of the fraternal document signed by José Antonio Echeverría in August, the Directorio had persisted in carrying out violent actions on its own. Shortly after a second meeting between Fidel and Echeverría in October, Directorio gunmen had murdered Colonel Manuel Blanco Rico, who was in charge of Batista’s Military Intelligence Service. Remarkably, for someone about to launch an invasion, Fidel publicly condemned the killing as “unwarranted and arbitrary.” His insinuation to Cuba’s opposition-minded citizens was obvious.
He
was the responsible revolutionary, whereas Echeverría was a loose cannon, a terrorist whose activities could reap only more violence. Within days, Fidel’s words acquired a retrospective halo of prescience when policemen hunting for the colonel’s assassins murdered ten hapless young asylum seekers inside the Haitian embassy.

On November 23, the moment for which Che had prepared for so long had finally come. Fidel had decided it was time to go. He ordered the rebels in Mexico City, Veracruz, and Tamaulipas to converge the next day in Pozo Rico, an oil town just south of Tuxpan. Without any notice, Che had been picked up by the Cubans and driven to the Gulf coast. That night, November 24, they would load up the yacht and depart.

The irony in all this cloak-and-dagger activity was that Fidel Castro’s planned invasion of Cuba had become public knowledge. Everyone in Cuba knew he was going to do it. The only question was exactly where and when he planned to land his rebel force. Indeed, a few days earlier, Batista’s chief of staff had held a press conference in Havana to discuss—and deride—Fidel’s possibilities of success, while beefing up military land and sea patrols along the island’s Caribbean coast.

Fidel was gambling on the support of the July 26 Movement in Oriente under Frank País, and on keeping the exact date and place of the
Granma
’s landing secret until the last minute. He had estimated that their voyage would take five days, and so, just before leaving Mexico City, he dispatched a coded message to País that the
Granma
would arrive November 30 at a deserted beach in Oriente called Playa las Coloradas.

In the predawn darkness of November 25, Che was among the throng of men scrambling to board the
Granma
. The final hours of Fidel Castro’s rebel army on Mexican soil were jittery and confusing. Not everyone had arrived, and some of those who had come were left behind at the last minute for lack of space. Now, for better or worse, they were off. The
Granma
, crammed with eighty-two men and a heap of guns and equipment, pushed off from the Tuxpan riverbank and slipped downriver toward the Gulf of Mexico and Cuba.

Ernesto left behind a letter to be forwarded to his mother. He wrote that, “to avoid premortem patheticisms,” it would not be sent until “the potatoes are really on the fire and then you will know that your son, in a sunstruck American country, will be cursing himself for not having studied more of surgery to attend to a wounded man. ...

“And now comes the tough part, old lady; that from which I have never run away and which I have always liked. The skies have not turned black, the constellations have not come out of their orbits nor have there been floods or overly insolent hurricanes; the signs are good. They signal victory. But if they are mistaken, and in the end even the gods make mistakes, then I believe I can say like a poet whom you don’t know: ‘I will only take to my grave / the nightmare of an unfinished song.’ I kiss you again, with all the love of a good-bye that resists being total. Your son.”

Che, seated in the foreground, with some comrades in the Sierra Maestra, Cuba, early in 1957.

Ernesto’s words in his last, melodramatic letter home were as prescient about the danger he faced as they were mistaken about his own reactions to it. When the potatoes were really “on the fire,” in the form of an army ambush that caught the rebels by surprise a few days after the
Granma
landed, the last thing on Ernesto’s mind was his inexperience with field surgery.

In the panicked melee that followed, as some men were shot down and others fled in all directions, Ernesto faced a split-second decision over whether to rescue a first aid kit or a box of ammunition. He chose the latter. If there was ever a decisive moment in Ernesto Guevara’s life, that was it. He may have possessed a medical degree, but his true instincts were those of a fighter.

Moments later, hit in the neck by a ricocheting bullet and believing himself to be mortally wounded, he went into shock. After firing his rifle once into the bushes, he lay still and in a reverie began pondering the best way to die. The image that came to him was from Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire,” about a man in Alaska who, unable to light a fire, sits against a tree to freeze to death with dignity.

Ernesto had envisioned himself fighting back tenaciously to the shout of
“victoria o muerte,”
but in the shock of the ambush and his own wounding, he momentarily gave up hope. In contrast to many of his comrades—who either lost their nerve completely or responded as soldiers, firing at the enemy while moving toward cover—Ernesto lay back, coolly meditating on the prospect of his imminent death.

If reaching for ammunition rather than a medical kit in his first taste of combat revealed something fundamental about Ernesto Guevara, so did
being wounded: a fatalism about death. Over the next two years of war, this trait became manifest as he developed into a combat-seasoned guerrilla with a distinct taste for battle and a notorious disregard for his own safety. In war, Celia’s errant son finally found his true métier.

The voyage of the
Granma
across the choppy Gulf of Mexico and into the Caribbean had been an unmitigated disaster. Instead of the expected five days, the journey took seven. Then, weakened from seasickness, the rebels landed at the wrong spot on the Cuban coast. Their arrival was to have coincided with an uprising in Santiago led by Frank País, and a reception party awaited them at the Cabo Cruz lighthouse, with trucks and 100 men. The two forces were to have attacked the nearby town of Niquero together, then hit the city of Manzanillo before escaping into the Sierra Maestra. But the revolt in Santiago took place while Fidel was at sea, and any element of surprise was irrevocably gone. Batista rushed reinforcements to the Oriente province and dispatched naval and air force patrols to intercept Fidel’s landing party.

The
Granma
approached the Playa las Coloradas before dawn on the morning of December 2, 1956. As the men on board anxiously strained to spot the Cabo Cruz lighthouse, the navigator fell overboard. Rapidly using up the precious remaining minutes of darkness, the boat circled until his cries were heard and he was rescued. Then, after Fidel ordered the pilot to aim for the nearest point of land, the
Granma
struck a sandbar, turning their arrival in Cuba into more of a shipwreck than a landing. Leaving most of their ammunition, food, and medicines behind, the rebels waded ashore in the broad daylight of mid-morning.

They didn’t know it yet, but they had been spotted by a Cuban coast guard cutter, which in turn had alerted the armed forces. They had also landed more than a mile short of their intended rendezvous point, and between them and dry land lay a mangrove swamp. In any case, their reception party, after waiting in vain for two days, had withdrawn the night before. They were on their own.