Che Guevara (37 page)

Split into two groups after reaching dry land, the exhausted rebels floundered on through the bush, jettisoning more equipment as they went. As Che described them later, they were “disoriented and walking in circles, an army of shadows, of phantoms walking as if moved by some obscure psychic mechanism.” Government planes flew continuously overhead looking for them, machine-gunning the bush for good measure. Two days went by before the two groups found each other and, with the guidance of a local peasant, trekked inland, moving eastward toward the Sierra Maestra.

Just after midnight on the morning of December 5, the column halted to rest in a sugarcane field, where the men devoured stalks of cane—carelessly leaving traces of their presence—before marching on until day-break to a place called Alegría de Pío. Their guide then left them, making tracks to the nearest detachment of soldiers to turn them in. The rebels passed the day bivouacked in a glade at the edge of the cane field, totally unaware of what awaited them.

At 4:30 that afternoon, the army attacked. Caught by surprise, the rebels panicked and milled around as volleys of bullets flew into their midst. Fidel and his closest companions ran from the cane field into the forest, ordering the others to follow. In their effort to do so, men abandoned their equipment and ran off in headlong flight. Others, paralyzed by shock or terror, stayed where they were. That was when Che tried to rescue the box of bullets: as he did, a burst of gunfire hit a man next to him in the chest and Che in the neck. “The bullet hit the box first and threw me on the ground,” Che recorded cryptically in his field diary. “I lost hope for a couple of minutes.”
*

Surrounded by wounded and frightened men screaming to surrender, and believing himself to be dying, Che slipped into his reverie. Juan Almeida snapped him out of it, telling him to get up and run. Che, Almeida, and three other men fled into the jungle with the sound of the cane field roaring in flames behind them.

Che had been lucky. His neck wound was only superficial. Although some of his comrades escaped with their lives, over the coming days Batista’s troops summarily executed many of the men they captured, including the wounded and even some of those who had surrendered. The survivors tried desperately to gain refuge in the mountains and, somehow, to find one another. Of the eighty-two men who came ashore from the
Granma
, only twenty-two ultimately regrouped in the sierra.
†

Che and his comrades stumbled on through the night. At dawn, they hid in a cave and made a portentous pledge to fight to the death if they were encircled. In his diary, Che wrote, “We had a tin of milk and approximately one liter of water. We heard the noise of combat nearby. The planes machine-gunned. We came out at night, guiding ourselves with the moon and North Star until they disappeared and [then] we slept.” They knew they had to keep heading east to reach the sierra, and the “North Star” was Che’s discovery, but his recollection of astronomy was less complete than he thought. Much later, he realized that they had actually followed a different star, and it had been sheer luck that they marched in the right direction.

Desperate from thirst, the five fugitives hiked through the forest. They had almost no water by then, and their only tin of milk had been accidentally spilled. They ate nothing that day. The next day, December 8, they came within sight of the coast and spotted a pond of what appeared to be fresh water below. But dense forest and 150-foot cliffs lay between them and it, and before they could find a way down, airplanes appeared overhead and once again they had to take cover, waiting out the daylight hours with only a liter of water between them. By nightfall, desperate from hunger and thirst, they gorged themselves on the only thing they could find, prickly pears. Moving through the night, they came across a hut where they found three more comrades from the
Granma
. Now they were eight, but they had no idea who else had survived. All they knew was that their best chance of finding any others was by heading east, into the Sierra Maestra.

The following days were an ordeal of survival as the little band hunted for food and water, dodging army airplanes and enemy foot patrols. Once, from a cave overlooking a coastal bay, they watched as a naval landing party disembarked on the beach to join the hunt for rebel stragglers. That day, unable to move, Che and his friends shared water, drinking from the eyepieces of their binoculars. “The situation was not good,” Che wrote later. “If we were discovered, not the slightest chance of escape; we would have no alternative but to fight it out on the spot to the end.” After dark they moved off again, determined to leave a place where they felt like “rats in a trap.”

On December 12, they found a peasant’s hut. Music was playing, and as they were about to enter the hut they overheard a voice inside make a toast: “To my comrades in arms.” Assuming the voice to be a soldier’s, they ran off. They marched along a streambed until midnight, when, reeling from exhaustion, they could go no farther.

After another day spent hiding without food or water, they took up the march again, but morale was low and many of the weary men balked, saying they no longer wanted to continue. The mood changed late that night
when they reached a farmer’s home, and, despite Che’s wariness, they knocked at the door and were received warmly. Their host turned out to be a Seventh-Day Adventist pastor and a member of the fledgling July 26 peasant network in the region.

“They received us very well and gave us food,” Che wrote in his field diary. “The men got sick from eating so much.” When he recalled the experience later, in
Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria
, Che rendered the experience with dark humor: “The little house that sheltered us turned into an inferno. Almeida was the first to be overcome by diarrhea; and, in a flash, eight unappreciative intestines gave evidence of the blackest ingratitude.”

They spent the next day recovering from their gluttony and receiving an endless succession of curious Adventists from the surrounding community. The rebel landing was big news, and, thanks to a flourishing bush telegraph, the locals were surprisingly well informed about what had taken place. Che and his companions learned that sixteen of the
Granma
’s men were known to be dead, murdered immediately after surrendering. Five more were believed to have been taken prisoner alive, and an unknown number had, like themselves, managed to escape into the mountains. It wasn’t known whether Fidel had survived.

They decided to spread themselves out, staying in different homes in the area. They took other security precautions as well, shedding their uniforms and dressing up as peasants, and hiding their weapons and ammunition. Only Che and Almeida, acting jointly as the unofficial leaders of the group, each kept a pistol. Too sick to move, one of the men was left behind. But as they moved out, they learned that news of their presence had reached the army’s ears. Only hours after they left the house they had been staying in, soldiers arrived, found their weapons cache, and took their sick comrade away as a prisoner. Someone had squealed, and now the soldiers were hot on their trail.

Fortunately, help arrived quickly. Alerted to their presence, Guillermo García, a key member of the July 26 peasant network, came to guide them out of harm’s way. From him they learned that Fidel, or “Alejandro”
*
—his nom de guerre—was still alive; he and two companions had made contact with the rebel movement’s collaborators and he had sent García out to look for survivors.

Several days of marching lay between them and Fidel’s refuge deeper in the mountains, but thanks to García, Che and his comrades were aided by friendly peasants along the way. Finally, at dawn on December 21, they
reached the coffee
finca
where Fidel awaited them. There they found that Raúl Castro too had survived, arriving separately with four companions after his own grueling odyssey.

Despite the catastrophic setback to his plans, Fidel was already organizing things. Peasants had been enlisted to help find survivors from the
Granma
still on the run, and a courier had been dispatched to Santiago and Manzanillo to seek help from Frank País and Celia Sánchez, the woman who had set up the July 26 peasant network in the sierra. Still, the outlook was grim. Of the eighty-two men who had come ashore from the
Granma
, only fifteen had reassembled, with nine weapons left between them. Almost three weeks had passed, and the possibility of finding more stragglers grew slimmer by the day. With Che’s arrival came word of Jesús Montané’s capture and the death of Fidel’s friend Juan Manuel Márquez and two others. By now, Che also knew that his friend Ñico López had been killed. Over the coming days, five more expeditionaries would trickle in, including Che’s old prison mate Calixto García, but Fidel’s rebel army was a mere shell. It would have to rely upon local peasants to rebuild.

The reunion with Fidel was not a happy one for Che and his companions. Fidel was furious with them for having lost their arms. “You have not paid for the error you committed,” he told them. “Because the price to pay for the abandonment of your weapons under such circumstances is your life. The one and only hope of survival that you would have had, in the event of a head-on encounter with the army, was your guns. To abandon them was both criminal and stupid.” That night, Che suffered an asthma attack, very possibly caused by the emotional upset of Fidel’s disapproval. Several years later, he admitted that Fidel’s “bitter reproach” had remained “engraved on his mind for the duration of the campaign, and even today.”

Fidel certainly had a valid point, but his tirade was somewhat gratuitous, for by then his courier had returned from Manzanillo with Celia Sánchez’s promise of new weapons. Indeed, the day after Che arrived, so did the new guns, which included some carbines and four submachine guns. Che’s asthma vanished, but the arms delivery didn’t cheer him up much, for there was important symbolism in the way Fidel distributed the weapons. Taking away Che’s pistol—a symbol of his status—Fidel gave it to the leader of the peasant network, a wily strongman named Crescencio Pérez. In its place, Che was given what he sourly called a “bad rifle.”

It was a firsthand lesson in Fidel’s masterful ability to manipulate the feelings of those around him by bestowing or withdrawing his favors at a moment’s notice. Che was extremely sensitive to Fidel’s approval and anxious to retain his status as a member of his inner circle; it had been only a few months since he had written his “Ode to Fidel,” swearing his undying
loyalty and describing Fidel as an “ardent prophet of the dawn.” Perhaps aware of Che’s wounded feelings, Fidel gave him a chance to redeem himself the next day. Deciding suddenly to carry out a surprise test of combat readiness among the men, he selected Che to pass on his orders to prepare for battle. Che responded with alacrity. In his diary, he wrote, “I came running to give the news. The men responded well with a good fighting spirit.”

That day Celia’s couriers arrived from Manzanillo with more arms, bringing 300 rifle bullets, forty-five more for their Thompson submachine gun, and nine sticks of dynamite. Che was overjoyed when the expedition’s only other doctor, Faustino Pérez, who had been dispatched to Havana to assume duties there as Fidel’s point man, gave him his own brand-new rifle with a telescopic scope—“a jewel”—Che wrote elatedly in his diary.

Things had righted themselves again. Fidel’s ire abated as he turned his mind to the exigencies of organizing for war. But the upbraiding must have been galling. Fidel may have hung on to
his
weapon in flight, but his judgment had led them into catastrophe in the first place, beginning with the
Granma
’s grounding offshore. And after the ambush at Alegría de Pío, in the absence of any contingency plans, it had been a matter of
sálvase quien puede
—every man for himself. Che’s group had done the best it could, and had survived.

If Che harbored resentment, he didn’t dwell on it, but over the next several days a certain impatience with Fidel’s style of command began to creep into his diary. On December 22, Che observed that it had been “a day of almost total inactivity.” The next day, they were “still in the same place.” And on Christmas Eve, in “a wait that seems useless to me,” they remained rooted, awaiting more arms and ammunition. He described Christmas Day with fine irony: “At last, after a sumptuous feast of pork we began the march toward Los Negros. The march began very slowly, breaking fences with which [our] visiting card was left. We carried out an exercise of assaulting a house, and as we did the owner, Hermes, appeared. We [then] lost two hours between coffee and conversation. At last we resolved to take to the road and advanced some more but the noise [we made] betrayed our presence to any hut along the way, and they abound. At dawn we reached our destination.”

Che wanted to see more organization, discipline, and action. He wanted the war to begin. One item that did cheer him up a bit during this period was a report in a Cuban newspaper about a loathsome personality in Fidel’s expeditionary force, “an Argentine Communist with terrible antecedents, expelled from his country.” Wrote Che, “The surname, of course: Guevara.”

In Mexico, as elsewhere, the news of the debacle at Alegría de Pío had been front-page news. The American UPI correspondent in Havana had fallen for the Batista government’s claim of a total victory and sent it out on the wires as a news scoop. Many papers had picked it up. Along with Fidel and Raúl Castro, Ernesto Guevara was listed among the dead.

Hilda heard the news at her office. “When I arrived at work I found everyone with solemn looks: there was an embarrassed silence, and I wondered what was happening. Then I became conscious that everyone was looking at me. A fellow coworker handed me a newspaper and said: ‘We are very sorry—about the news.’”

Devastated, Hilda was given leave to go home. Over the following days, her friends, including Myrna Torres, Laura de Albizu Campos, and General Bayo, rallied around her. Trying to comfort her, Bayo reminded her that the report had not yet been confirmed and insisted that he for one didn’t believe it. She anxiously waited for more news, but little appeared in the press to confirm or deny the initial reports.