Che Guevara (40 page)

He signed the letter “Chancho” and sent a
gran abrazo
to her, as well as hugs and kisses for the baby, and told her that in his rush to leave he had left behind the snapshots he had of them in Mexico City. Could she send them? He gave her the address of a mail drop in Mexico where letters would be forwarded to him eventually.

Hilda couldn’t have been very pleased by the letter, which she reproduced without comment in her memoirs. While she, the despondent wife and mother, had done little but worry about him, he was having a rousing adventure, thoroughly enjoying life as an unwashed, cigar-smoking, “blood-thirsty”
guerrilla. When he had finally written, he hadn’t even inquired or expressed concern for her own possible travails.

Over the next three weeks, the rebels roamed across the Sierra Maestra, picking up a few new volunteers, but dogged by desertions and
chivatazos
. On January 30, the air force bombed the place they had chosen for a base camp, on the slopes of Pico Caracas. Although the raid caused no casualties, it sent the rebels on a panicked exodus through the forest. Meanwhile, their pursuers, led by a notoriously brutal officer—Major Joaquín Casillas, who was said to possess a private collection of human ears shorn from previous victims—sent out spies disguised as civilians to follow them. His soldiers left in their wake a trail of burned huts and murdered peasants accused of collaborating with the rebels.

Che was now emerging as an audacious, even reckless guerrilla fighter. Evidently eager to prove himself and to make up for his sorely felt error of losing his rifle en route from Alegría de Pío, he routinely volunteered for the most dangerous tasks. During the aerial bombardment on Pico Caracas, when everyone else—including Fidel—ran away, Che stayed behind to pick up stragglers and retrieve abandoned belongings, including weapons and Fidel’s
comandante
cap.

Other strong traits were emerging. He had begun to show a prose-cutorial severity with guerrilla newcomers, especially those from the city, usually distrusting their personal valor, fortitude, and commitment to the struggle. No less mistrustful of the peasants they met, he often described them in his diary as “charlatans, fast talkers,” or “nervous.” He was also developing a deep hatred of cowards, an obsession that was soon to be one of his most renowned and feared wartime traits. He disliked one member of the band in particular, “El Gallego” José Morán, a veteran from the
Granma
whom he suspected of cowardice and viewed as a potential deserter.

Che sought opportunities to mete out punishment as an example to others. When three army spies were detained by the rebels and confessed their true identities, Che was among those who called for their deaths. Fidel chose to show mercy by sending them back to their barracks with a warning and a personal letter from him to their commander. Keen to see the guerrillas tempered into a tough, disciplined fighting force and worried about Fidel’s toleration of malingerers and insubordinates, Che was gratified when Fidel finally laid down the law at the end of January. From that moment on, Fidel told his men, three crimes would be punishable by death: “desertion, insubordination, and defeatism.” When one deserter, Sergio Acuña, met a grisly
end at the hands of army captors—Acuña was tortured, shot four times, then hanged by the neck—Che termed the incident “sad but instructive.”

By the end of January, there were signs that Fidel’s little band was having an effect throughout Cuba. Word arrived from Havana that Faustino Pérez, Fidel’s man there, had raised $30,000 for the rebels; that the July 26 urban cells were carrying out sabotage in the cities; and that there was simmering discontent in army ranks over the embarrassing rebel attacks. Batista was said to be about to fire the army chief of staff, but he and his generals persisted in claiming that the rebels had been virtually exterminated, were on the run, and posed no threat to the army. This propaganda campaign greatly irked Fidel, and he ordered Faustino Pérez to arrange an interview for him with a credible journalist who could come to the sierra and verify his existence to the world at large. He also wanted to hold a meeting with his National Directorate to coordinate strategy, and sent word to Frank País and Celia Sánchez to organize a conference.

In early February the rebels spent a few days resting up, enduring torrential rains and aimless daily bombing runs by the air force. In the comparative lull, Che began giving French lessons to Raúl. These were interrupted when they set out again and Che was weakened by diarrhea and a crippling but short bout of malaria. In an army ambush on a hill called Los Altos de Espinosa, Julio Zenon Acosta—an illiterate black
guajiro
to whom Che had recently begun teaching the alphabet—was killed. It was the rebels’ first combat death since the
Granma
’s landing. Later, Che would exalt Zenon Acosta, whom he called “my first pupil,” as the kind of “noble peasant” who made up the heart and soul of the revolution.

As time had worn on, Che and Fidel had begun to suspect that their peasant guide Eutimio Guerra—who came and went, and whose absences always coincided with the army’s attacks—was a traitor. After the ambush on Los Altos de Espinosa, they learned from knowledgeable peasants that their suspicions were correct. On one of his outings, Guerra had been captured by the army and promised a reward if he betrayed Fidel. Both the aerial bombardment on Pico Caracas and the latest ambush had been carried out with his collusion. But by the time they learned this, Guerra had vanished, followed by El Gallego Morán.

By mid-February a number of men were sick and demoralized, and Fidel decided to conduct a purge. They would be given “convalescent leave” at a
guajiro
’s farm under Crescencio Pérez’s care. At the same time, couriers brought word that the members of the July 26 National Directorate were on their way to Oriente, and that Herbert Matthews, a prominent
New York Times
journalist, was arriving to interview Fidel at a farmhouse on the sierra’s northern flanks. It was to be a fateful meeting.

Che Guevara was now at war, trying to create a revolution. He had made a conscious leap of faith and entered a domain where lives could be taken for an ideal and where the end
did
justify the means. People were no longer simply people; each person represented a place within the overall scheme of things and could be viewed, for the most part, as either a friend or an enemy. Those in between were distrusted, as they had to be. His goal was to help Fidel Castro take power, and he awoke each day with the prospect of killing and dying.

Just as Che’s worldview had been expanded by leaving home, it had contracted when his quest to decide what he believed in was resolved in Marxism. Reality was now a matter of black and white. At the same time, Che believed that the faith he had chosen was limitless. What he was doing had a historic imperative.

As the rebels sat down to eat a goat stew cooked for them by a friendly black family on the second day of their trek to the farmhouse where the National Directorate meeting would be held, El Gallego Morán suddenly reappeared. He told an unconvincing tale to explain his disappearance. He had gone out hunting for food and spotted the traitor Eutimio Guerra. When he lost him, he was unable to find his way back to camp. Che remarked in his diary, “The truth of El Gallego’s behavior is very difficult to know, but to me it is simply a matter of a frustrated desertion. ... I advised killing him there and then, but Fidel blew off the matter.”

Heading on, they reached a rural store owned by a friend of Eutimio Guerra’s. The friend was gone, so they broke down the door and discovered
“a true paradise of canned goods,” which they proceeded to devour. After laying a false trail to throw off pursuers, they marched through the night and, at dawn on February 16, reached the farm of a peasant collaborator named Epifanio Díaz. The meeting was to take place there.

Fidel and Che, lighting a cigar, in the Sierra Maestra.

The members of the National Directorate had already started to arrive. Frank País and Celia Sánchez were there; next came Faustino Pérez and Vílma Espín, a new female Movement activist from Santiago; then Haydée Santamaría and her fiancé, Armando Hart. This was the active inner core of the July 26 steering group that Fidel had assembled in the summer of 1955 after his release from prison on the Isle of Pines.

At twenty-three, Frank País was the youngest of the Directorate’s members, but he had already chalked up an impressive career as a political activist in Oriente, where he was vice president of the student federation. Since the creation of the July 26 Movement, he had thrown in his lot with Fidel as coordinator of rebel activities in Oriente. Celia Sánchez, thirty-seven, had been active in the campaign to free the Moncada prisoners and, from her home base in Manzanillo, had collaborated with Fidel since the Movement’s founding. It was she who had recruited Crescencio Pérez and organized the reception party that had awaited the
Granma
’s arrival. Like Fidel, the thirty-seven-year-old doctor Faustino Pérez—unrelated to Crescencio—had come out of Havana University and had been a student leader in opposition to Batista after the 1952 coup. Joining
forces with Fidel, he had gone to Mexico and been aboard the
Granma
. Armando Hart, a twenty-seven-year-old law student who was the son of a prominent judge, had come out of the Ortodoxo Youth movement. Hart joined Faustino Pérez in organizing student opposition to Batista and helped found Fidel’s movement. His twenty-five-year-old fiancée, Haydée Santamaría, had joined the Moncada assault and been jailed for seven months afterward; she too was a July 26 founder and had joined in the November 1956 uprising in Oriente led by Frank País. Her family had already paid dearly for their involvement with Fidel. Her brother Abel, an Ortodoxo Youth militant, had been Fidel’s deputy until his death by torture at Moncada, and her brother Aldo was in prison for Movement activities. The newest face, Vílma Espín, was the twenty-seven-year-old, MIT-educated daughter of an affluent Santiago family, a member of Frank País’s student group, which had fused with the July 26 Movement and had participated in the November 1956 uprising. These young, mostly upper-middle-class urbanites were in charge of the Movement’s entire national underground structure, responsible for everything including recruiting new members, obtaining and smuggling arms and volunteers into the sierra, raising cash and supplies, disseminating propaganda, conducting foreign relations, undertaking urban sabotage, and continuing the effort to come up with a political platform.

It was a historic day. Fidel was meeting Celia Sánchez—soon to become his closest confidante and lover—for the first time. Raúl met the woman who would become his future wife: Vílma Espín. For Che, it was his first look at the men and women who formed the elite backbone of Fidel’s revolutionary movement.

In general, Che viewed Fidel’s middle-class, well-educated colleagues as hopelessly bound to timid notions of what their struggle should achieve, and he was correct in thinking that they held views very divergent from his own. Lacking his Marxist conception of a radical social transformation, most saw themselves as fighting to oust a corrupt dictatorship and to replace it with a conventional Western democracy. Che’s initial encounter with the urban leaders reinforced his negative assumptions. “Through isolated conversations,” he wrote in his diary, “I discovered the evident anticommunist inclinations of most of them, above all Hart.” By the next day, however, his analysis had modified slightly. “Of the women, Haydée seems the best oriented politically, Vílma the most interesting. Celia Sánchez is very active but politically strangled. Armando Hart [is] permeable to the new ideas.”
*

Over the next couple of days, one thing became clear: Fidel wanted to make his rebel army the absolute priority of the Movement. The National Directorate had come with their own ideas about what the Movement’s strategy should be, but Fidel told them that their efforts should be directed toward sustaining and strengthening his guerrillas. He sidestepped Faustino’s proposal to open a second front nearer Havana in the Escambray mountains of Villa Clara province, and Frank País’s argument that he leave the sierra to give speeches and raise funds abroad. In the end, the others were overwhelmed by Fidel’s arguments and agreed to begin organizing a national “civic resistance” support network. Frank País promised to send him a contingent of new fighters from Santiago within a fortnight. Epifanio Díaz’s farm, which in the future would serve as their secret gateway to the sierra, was to be the meeting place.

Che was not a member of the National Directorate and, careful not to overstep his authority at this early stage, did not attend their meetings. But he was privy to all that happened in them, and, as his diary reveals, signs of the future rift that would develop between the armed fighters in the sierra and their urban counterparts in the llano were already in evidence. For now, Fidel was able to plead his case for the sierra’s priority as an undeniable issue of survival. But as the war expanded, the rift would break into the open as an ideological dispute between left and right, and as a struggle for control between the llano leaders and Fidel.