Killing Castro

SIX

To All Who May Be Concerned

By this means it is announced that any person who furnishes information leading to a successful operation against any rebel nucleus commanded by Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, Crescencio Perez, Guillermo Gonzalez, or any other leader, will be rewarded in accordance with the importance of the information, with the understanding that it will never be less than $5,000. This reward will vary from $5,000 to $100,000, the highest amount, that is, $100,000, being payable for the head of Fidel Castro.

Note: The name of the informer shall never be revealed.

This notice appeared throughout Cuba. It was posted in every section of Oriente Province, tacked to tree upon tree, nailed to fence post after fence post. Batista was growing desperate; the head of Fidel Castro was now easily worth one hundred thousand dollars to him. Castro had returned to Cuba. He headed a tiny rebel band which grew in numbers every day, a band which caused the throne of the dictator to tremble.

The Gramma was a yacht owned by an American named Erickson who lived in Mexico City. In early 1956 Colonel Alberto Bayo had begun training Castro’s troops on a Mexican ranch, leading them in forced marches, instructing them in combat techniques, guerrilla warfare, compressing into a three-month period all the training they would have received in three years at a military academy. By November of ’56 Castro was ready. Comrades bought the Gramma from Erickson and Castro filled the ship with his eighty-two soldiers and all the arms at their disposal. The loading was conducted in secret at Tuxpan, a river port in Vera Cruz. On November 25th the ship set sail, cruising down the Rio Tuxpan to the Gulf of Mexico, heading eastward for Oriente Province and war with Batista.

While Castro was at sea, underground forces launched an uprising in Santiago. Batista replied by suspending all civil rights in the eastern sectors of the island, sending tank battalions to Oriente to crush the rebellion. Castro was sailing into the mouth of hell. Batista knew he was coming, knew the revolt he planned. Yet the Gramma landed on December 2 and Castro’s forces disappeared into the hills.

The revolution was in progress.

It was a new sort of revolution. The first order of business was that of survival, an impossible enough task at the beginning. The government troops were everywhere, rooting out rebels and crushing them by sheer weight of numbers. Of Castro’s original landing party of eighty-two men, only twenty-two managed to stay alive. And ten of those were captured, leaving a band of twelve to carry on the revolution in the hills. Could twelve men topple a tyrant? It seemed to be a question not worth answering, a thorough impossibility.

But Batista was afraid, and had good reason to be. His answer was terror and repression, terror which had to be witnessed to be believed. His air force crossed the hills of Oriente time and time again, strafing fields at random on the off chance that rebels lay hiding there. His soldiers roamed Oriente, arresting peasants at will on charges of aiding Castro. Men and women were murdered. Peasants were tortured by the score in an attempt to gain information about Castro.

Terror was a poor weapon. Peasants who had given no thought to politics now saw Castro’s men on one side, brave and honest, paying for food and shelter. And on the other side were Batista’s mercenaries, taking what they wanted, looting, raping and slaughtering. These peasants listened to Castro’s promises of agrarian reform, heard him speak of liberty and freedom. The twelve ragged rebels grew in number. New recruits swelled their ranks, and peasants throughout Oriente were ready to feed and hide them from the government soldiers.

The spirit of rebellion which Castro had started in the hills soon spread to the cities. Underground cells sprang into being, harassing Batista’s men and gathering ammunition and supplies for the rebels in the east. A band of Havana students fearlessly attempted to assassinate Batista; the plot misfired and the assassins were machine-gunned outside the palace. The dictator grew increasingly desperate. His secret police made midnight arrests, and citizens vanished into jails and died there. Libertarian newspapers were suspended from publication. Their editors were tortured, murdered.

Castro could not be crushed. His men put the full techniques of guerrilla warfare into operation, striking, running and living to strike again. They sucked raw sugar cane to stay alive. They threw away their razors, vowing to remain unshaven until the revolution was a reality. The full beard became the emblem of liberty, and the public saw the barbudos—the bearded ones—as a new generation of freedom fighters, a race of supermen.

Batista’s wave of terror could not defeat Fidel Castro. The healthy revolution feeds on terror, thrives on it. Every act of repression wins support for the men who are fighting to overthrow the oppressor. Still, the terror of the dictator served a purpose.

It did not defeat Castro. But it began to change him.

It is not easy to fight a clean fight against an opponent who fights dirty. It is no simple matter to observe the Marquess of Queensberry rules in a contest with one who is trying to gouge your eyes and plant a knee in your groin. The temptation is always present to fight fire with fire, to greet terror with new terror.

Castro did this. There is still the question whether he ever intended to fight any other way. After all, many of his followers had been Communists for some time. Many of them had spent time in Russia and had learned Communist tactics there.

At the Sierra Maestro, Castro found a ranch foreman who had accused tenant farmers of being pro-rebel and who had greatly increased his personal land holdings at their expense. Castro’s men seized the foreman, tried him and executed him.

This was revolutionary justice.

Revolutionary justice. It was a fresh term, a new term, a carefully chosen rationalization for fighting fire with fire, for meeting the terror of Batista with the terror of the rebels. If Batista could torture and kill those who aided rebels, then Castro could leave the mutilated bodies of Batistianos as a grim souvenir of his purpose. If Batista could burn houses and slaughter peasants, Castro could go him one better and set sugar-cane fields afire and lay waste to thousands of acres of farmland.

If Batista could retreat into paranoia, seeing enemies on every side and leveling vengeful cries in every direction, Castro could adopt this paranoia and improve upon it. He, too, could reward those who followed him. And he, too, could swear eternal vengeance upon his enemies.

His movement was gaining ground; the ultimate success of his revolution was inevitable. But he himself was changing. Either that or he had been carefully hiding his real purpose all along.