Paul J. Dosal Sample Chapter

Comandante Che

by Paul J. Dosal

Chapter 1: Nobody Surrenders Here!

Until he arrived at the port of Tuxpan, Mexico, on November 24, 1956, Ernesto Guevara, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor from Argentina, did not know how Fidel Castro, a thirty-year-old revolutionary from Cuba, intended to transport his rebel army across the Caribbean Sea. A week earlier, a Havana newspaper had published Castro’s threat to invade Cuba if dictator Fulgencio Batista did not resign immediately. In contrast to putting forth that impudent declaration, Castro divulged few details of his invasion plans to his soldiers. Few rebels knew how, when, or where the invasion would take place. They all learned one sobering truth at Tuxpan. Castro planned to load one hundred soldiers and their supplies on a fifty-eight-foot yacht called the Granma. Built in 1943 and sunk a decade later, the refurbished vessel could safely carry only twenty-five people. When Universo Sánchez, a confidante of Castro, saw it anchored in the Tuxpan River, he asked timidly: "When do we get to the real ship? Where is the mother ship?"

On this pleasure craft, Fidel loaded 2 antitank guns, 90 rifles, 3 Thompson submachine guns, and 40 pistols, plus 48 cans of condensed milk, 2,000 oranges, 6 hams, a box of eggs, 100 chocolate bars, and 10 pounds of bread. Boxes filled up the cabin then spilled onto the deck, leaving rebels wondering where they might sit. When all the equipment and supplies had been loaded, eighty-two rebels filled up every remaining space. Castro left behind another fifty men, many of whom probably felt lucky that there had not been enough room for them on the Granma.

At 1:30 A.M., one of the vessel’s two diesel engines revved up and the yacht began the adventure that would alter Cuban history and make Ernesto Guevara the legendary "Che." Within an hour, the overloaded Granma left the calm waters of the river and entered the turbulent waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Che did not know where they would land and he could not identify his first military objective, but he joined the Cuban patriots in singing the Cuban national anthem.

Within five minutes, "the whole boat took on a ridiculously tragic appearance," Che later wrote. Men with whitened faces hurled their last supper into buckets; others lay in anguish until they could hold their churning stomachs no longer. Luckily Che did not get seasick and could tend to the men, but he had no motion sickness pills to prescribe. Then the yacht began to take on water. A handful of seaworthy men began to bail water while the mechanic tried frantically to get the pumps working. Che laughed when one sane sailor turned off an open faucet and stopped the flooding. The stench of failure already hung over the sickened warriors.

As the sun rose on the twenty-seventh, the rebels found themselves in calm seas north of the Yucatán peninsula. Fidel set a course directly eastward, hoping to make up for lost time. He had calculated that the journey from Mexico to Cuba would take five days. Because of rough seas, excessive weight, and one nonfunctioning motor, the Granma had been plugging along at 7.2 knots instead of the 10 knots that Castro had anticipated. The progress of the boat through placid waters lifted spirits and soothed stomachs, but it also resulted in an increasing demand for food, forcing Fidel to ration his scarce supplies. While most of the men recovered, Che fell victim to a severe asthma attack; the doctor had no medication to prescribe for himself either. Che had fought with asthma since he had been two years old, and it got the best of him during the journey. At 5:00 P.M. on November 28, the Granma changed course to the southeast, heading through Yucatán Channel into the Caribbean. (See Map 1.) With the abrupt change in course, it became obvious that Fidel did not intend to invade anywhere near Havana or western Cuba.

Castro intended to land the main body of the Movimiento 26 de Julio (26th of July Movement, or M-26-7) in eastern Cuba on November 30, at the same time that M-26-7 militants in Santiago and elsewhere would launch diversionary strikes on selected army garrisons and police stations. Fidel planned to land his rebel army at Playa las Coloradas, about twelve miles south of Niquero on the western coast of Oriente province. Frank País, the general coordinator of the M-26-7, planned to draw Batista’s army away from Castro’s invasion force by attacking the police headquarters, the maritime police office, and the Moncada garrison in Santiago. País, who had worked out the details of the general strategy with Fidel in Mexico, hoped to prevent Batista from sending reinforcements to engage Castro. By pinning down Cuban soldiers in Santiago, Holguín, and Guantánamo, the urban militants expected to facilitate Castro’s landing near Niquero, where M-26-7 militants led by Celia Sánchez would reinforce him with arms, ammunitions, supplies, and trucks. Castro would then lead his augmented force in attacks on the isolated army base at Niquero and possibly Manzanillo, capturing more arms and ammunition to supply a larger rebel army. From Manzanillo he could proceed to Santiago or into the Sierra Maestra. If País took Moncada he could join the M-26-7 forces there; if not, he could lead his men to a more secure location in the Sierra Maestra, from where he would direct a guerrilla campaign against Batista.

Given that the strategy required precise coordination between units in two countries, any delays en route could endanger the entire mission. By dawn on November 30, the Granma was still puttering along west of Gran Cayman Island, two days behind schedule. Even worse, the Cuban military had already learned of Castro’s departure from Mexico. At 5:45 A.M. on November 30, the Cuban air force initiated an islandwide search for a white sixty-five-foot yacht flying the Mexican flag. Cuban intelligence agents, working in collaboration with American and Mexican agents, had been monitoring Castro’s activities in Mexico for at least a year. American, Cuban, or Mexican agents probably detected the Granma’s departure soon after it sailed from Tuxpan, if not earlier. Given that Cuban insurrections had always been based in eastern Cuba, Batista expected Castro to invade Oriente province.

Beginning on November 5—three weeks before the Granma’s departure—the Cuban air force began flying patrols along the north and south coasts of Oriente province. Batista also reinforced army garrisons in Santiago and Holguín the day after the Granma left Tuxpan. The troop movements that Fidel hoped to deter by launching diversionary strikes had actually been promoted by his public declaration that he intended to invade Cuba. Batista’s patrols and troop movements prior to the Santiago uprisings clearly indicated that he intended to meet and defeat Castro’s rebel army, wherever it landed.

Unaware of Castro’s delay, Frank País attacked as scheduled. At 7:00 A.M. on November 30, M-26-7 soldiers attacked the police headquarters and the maritime police building in Santiago, while snipers tried to keep the soldiers in the Moncada barracks pinned down. Twenty rebels took the maritime police building, but País and his combatants met with stiff resistance at the police headquarters. At 11:00 A.M., País realized that the attacks would fail and ordered his men to change back into civilian clothes and filter into the general population. In Guantánamo, a group of rebels gained control of an army outpost, but they abandoned it and took to the hills when they learned of an approaching army patrol. In Holguín, the M-26-7 hit a few targets, but Havana remained absolutely quiet. Unable to communicate with País from the Granma, Castro could not discuss the situation with País and modify their strategy accordingly. He could only listen to radio reports about the Santiago uprising and contemplate his own dwindling alternatives, with an engagement with the Cuban army, navy, or air force increasingly likely. The men on the Granma never expected to land wholly undetected, but at the rate they were going, they most likely would be martyrs by the end of 1956.

By the evening of November 30, the rebels knew that the plans for a coordinated invasion and national uprising had failed. However, Castro could not change course and "invade" Jamaica, Mexico, or some other country. He could only disembark his rebel army in Cuba. The aborted Santiago uprising had definitely alerted the Cuban army to the pending arrival of Castro. On November 30 Batista suspended constitutional guarantees, declared the entire province of Oriente to be in a state of "Operations," and placed the rest of the country on alarm. Air and naval patrols continued. If Castro managed to elude the patrols and disembark in Oriente, he would now have to contend with an army under orders to search for and capture his rebel forces.

On the afternoon of December 1, Fidel finally divulged his military plans to his soldiers. Despite the defeat of the Santiago uprising, Castro announced that he would disembark the rebel army at a point near Niquero, from where, one can deduce, he still intended to attack the Niquero garrison. He could no longer count on receiving reinforcements from Celia Sánchez, because his landing had been delayed. In fact, Celia withdrew her units when the Granma did not land on November 30. Nothing in Fidel’s original plan had materialized, yet he refused to abandon his military strategy and disembark at a point with easier and safer access to the Sierra Maestra. A landing near Niquero made sense only if Castro intended to attack Niquero.

Ramón Bonachea and Marta San Martín, in their study of the Cuban insurrection, contend that Castro applied his contingency plan after he learned of the failure of the Santiago uprising. If he had opted for his contingency plans while en route to Cuba, he should have set a course for the southern coast of Oriente, from where the rebels would have had a relatively short and safe march to the Sierra Maestra. Castro definitely shelved his plans for an attack on Niquero, but he implemented his contingency plan after the Granma landing. He could have saved precious time and lives by landing his men at a site with shorter and safer access into the Sierra Maestra. Castro had evidently selected the farm of Mongo Pérez as his first operational headquarters and a rallying point. Located at Purial de Vicana, just five miles north of the coast, it provided an excellent staging area for a march into the Sierra Maestra. (See Map 2.) Celia Sánchez, leader of the M-26-7 forces in Manzanillo, favored a landing at or near Pilón, El Macho, or La Magdalena, all of them "ideal landing places" on the southern coast of Oriente province. "At Pilón, they would have been one step away from the Sierra; it is right on the flank of the mountain. There would have been no problems," Celia later explained.

As it happened, a shortage of fuel dictated Castro’s decision to attempt a landing at Coloradas beach. The expedition suffered a critical setback around one o’clock in the morning on December 2, when Roberto Roque, the navigator, fell overboard. Fidel could not make landfall without his navigator. The Granma circled around in search of Roque, with only a lantern available to illuminate the dark waters. After an hour, the rebels pulled Roque on board. In recovering Roque, Castro had expended precious supplies of fuel and pushed the scheduled landing perilously close to daybreak.

With Roque back at the helm, the Granma finally broke from its easterly course and headed northeast toward Coloradas beach. As the Granma sailed into Niquero channel, Captain Onelio Pino and Roberto Roque realized that their navigational charts were wrong. They did not know where they were. With dawn approaching and the tanks nearly out of fuel, Fidel could not waste any more time. He ordered full speed ahead, directly toward whatever coast lay in front of them. At 4:20 A.M., the Granma slid into the mud one hundred yards offshore, in a mangrove swamp more than a mile south of Coloradas beach. Fidel’s long-anticipated invasion of Cuba looked more like a shipwreck than an amphibious assault.

Around six o’clock that morning, Captain José Smith Comas, a veteran of the Korean War, began to disembark his vanguard platoon. The men lowered the lifeboat and loaded it with their heavy weapons. It sank. Unable to bring the yacht any closer, the men jumped into the water, carrying only their personal weapons overhead. Some men sank hip deep in mud. Captain Juan Almeida’s center platoon went into the water next, followed by Castro and his general staff (which included Che), and Captain Raúl Castro and his rearguard. As the men watched their boots sink into the mud, their hearts sank with them, as they gradually realized that they had landed in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had disembarked in a thick mangrove swamp, and an impenetrable net of branches, gnarly stumps, and tepid water faced them as far as they could see.

By 7:00 A.M. on December 2, Second Lieutenant Aquiles Chinea, commanding Squadron 12 of the Rural Guard in Manzanillo, received a confidential report that two hundred to three hundred well-armed men had landed at Coloradas beach, about sixteen miles south of Niquero. Lieutenant Chinea immediately ordered the commander of the Coast Guard 106 to scout the area. With only eight men under his command, Lieutenant Chinea knew that he could not engage the invaders until he received reinforcements from Bayamo. While he waited for help to arrive, he flew over the landing sight to determine the exact location, size, strength, and direction of the invading force.

As the rebels hacked their way through the mangroves, two planes randomly strafed the swamp. The pilots could not penetrate the swamp any easier than could the rebels cursing their way through it. Unable to spot the rebels moving slowly through the thicket below, the pilots strafed the area anyway, having little impact on the tortuous rebel movement through the swamp. It took the rebels more than two hours to cut through a mile of mangroves. Che, afflicted by the high humidity and rising heat, suffered through a vicious asthma attack while he plowed through the suffocating swamp. As soon as he joined the men on solid ground near the thatched-roof hut of Angel Pérez Rosabal, the sound of artillery and machine gun fire from the swamp from which they had just escaped indicated that the army was in pursuit. Castro ordered the troops to move out.

At this point, with enemy planes in pursuit and without Celia Sánchez’s reinforcements, a move toward Niquero would expose the troops to unnecessary risks. Castro finally abandoned his conventional strategy and ordered the rebels to march toward the Sierra Maestra. Unfortunately, a march to the Sierra Maestra now carried risks almost as high as an attack on Niquero because the rebels would have to travel more than sixty miles through Alegría del Pío and La Esperanza, along the only route to the sierra. Castro could only have suspected that the army would attempt to block his movement, as indeed it had. The army had already mobilized one thousand troops to block Castro’s path toward the mountains. Fortunately for him, some misinformation filtered into the Cuban army on December 2, when army patrols picked up rumors that Castro intended to attack Niquero that night, temporarily diverting the army’s attention away from the path that Castro actually took from the beach. Castro kept his men marching until nightfall, then they camped just a few miles from where the Granma actually landed.

At dawn on December 3, the men resumed the march south and eastward, looking for the quickest route into the Sierra Maestra. Few of them knew the terrain. Only nine of the men came from Oriente province; the rest of the rebels came from western and central Cuba, with Havana supplying thirty-eight of the eighty-two men in the rebel force. Che, one of four foreigners in the group, was just a year older than the average rebel, but he had more education than most of them. He had never even been to Cuba before this, but he was willing to sacrifice his life and career for the cause. Around noon, he and his new comrades ate their first hot meal in days—yucca, bread dipped in honey, and some chicken broth—at the home of Zoilo Vega, a local peasant. Vega’s brother Tato then guided Fidel’s troops to a path that ran through a large sugar plantation. The rebels settled for the evening at a clearing, while scouts and foragers searched for stragglers and food.

During the night, eight stragglers rejoined the rebel army, bringing it back to its full strength of eighty-two combatants. The foragers also brought in some crackers, sausages, and condensed milk. Castro ordered the march to resume at 8:00 A.M. on December 4. "We were an army of shadows, of ghosts," Che wrote later. Marching in single file through a well-covered path, the rebels still had to take cover from enemy planes more than thirty times during the day. They finally rested at midnight at a village called Agua Fina. They got only four hours of sleep before Castro ordered them back into line. They marched under cover of darkness to Alegría del Pío but could go no farther.

Dogged by enemy planes since their arrival, the rebels had marched through rugged terrain for three consecutive days, consuming most of their food rations along the way. The sugarcane fields provided them with some cover and food. Some of the men chewed on sugarcane stalks as they marched, leaving behind a trail of cane peelings. They did not know that their guide, Tato Vega, had betrayed them to the army. The Rural Guard had no problem picking up the rebel trail on December 4. That night, the army set ambushes near Alegría del Pío and La Esperanza, through which the rebels would have to pass.

Fidel decided to let his men rest during the day of December 5 and resume the march later that night. Around noon, Che noticed aircraft circling overhead at low altitudes. The rebels, however, rested and consumed their few rations, unaware of the approaching storm. Castro had encamped on a low unprotected hill bordered by cane fields to the front and left and a thicket to the right. The guards were posted so close to the camp that they were practically in it, making it impossible for them to warn the rebel army of an approaching army patrol. Most of the soldiers found a shady place to sleep and lay down with their weapons. Che tended to the men, most of whom suffered from blisters or fungal infections caused by the march through the mangrove swamp. Around 4:30 P.M. on December 5, Che sat down next to Jesús Montané to eat his ration of half a sausage and two crackers. Ernesto and Jesús were leaning against a tree, exchanging happy memories of their respective children, when a single shot suddenly fathered a terrifying silence.

Within seconds, a hurricane of bullets ripped through the camp. Rebel soldiers scattered, looking for cover or their commanding officer; others, including Ernesto, hugged the ground as bullets whizzed above them. They could not see their enemies and their enemies could not see them. But Squadrons 12 and 13 of the Rural Guard, commanded by Second Lieutenant Aquiles Chinea and Captain José C. Tandrón, respectively, unleashed a withering fire on the unsuspecting rebels. The Rural Guards had picked up the rebel trail at Agua Fina and followed them to the rebel camp at Alegría del Pío. They had decided to attack with machine-gun and rifle fire before nightfall, and they caught the rebels completely by surprise.

Fidel and a few members of his general staff fled from the attackers and took cover in the adjacent cane field. From there, Fidel attempted to withdraw and reorganize his men. But the surprise attack dispersed the rebels as soon as it began. Rebels hit the dirt, ran for cover, and fired back at an enemy they could not see. Although they had taken the rebels by surprise, the 140 men of the Rural Guard inflicted only three casualties in their initial assault, finding it difficult to hit their targets because of thick vegetation and a slight elevation that separated them from the rebels. The remaining seventy-nine combatants could have been reorganized for a counterattack, but Castro had not selected a rallying point before setting camp. In the heat of battle, he and his commanders could not organize a retreat or redeployment. A degree of panic ensued among the soldiers and their commanders, some of whom (including Che) were facing hostile fire for the first time. In Che’s account of the battle, he implied that the rebel command structure broke down: "I recall that [Juan] Almeida, then a captain, came beside me to get orders, but there was nobody there to issue them." Only Fidel Castro could have given orders to Captain Almeida, and from Fidel’s position in the cane field, he could not communicate effectively with his squad leaders. To get to his position, the rebels had to cross a path that exposed them to enemy fire. Captain Almeida returned to his group and tried to organize a defense on his own initiative.

Che, not one to shy away from risk, tried to follow Castro into the cane field. As he and Emilio Albentosa attempted to cross the path, a burst of gunfire dropped both men to the ground. One bullet struck a box of ammunition in Guevara’s shirt pocket and the ricochet grazed his neck. It was a minor injury, but in the heat of battle, with blood spilling over his uniform, Che was convinced that he and Albentosa, whose mouth and nose were spewing blood, had suffered mortal wounds. Guevara thought about killing himself, knowing that Batista’s soldiers would torture and execute any rebel they captured. He thought about the heroic character in "To Build a Fire," a short story by Jack London, one of his favorite authors. When the hero of London’s story realizes that he is about to freeze to death in the Alaskan wilderness, he calmly leans against a tree and accepts death with dignity. Che did not want to die screaming in agony. To prevent such an undignified end, he might have to kill himself before the enemy captured him.

The firing suddenly stopped and the enemy called on the rebels to surrender. One rebel, crawling near Che, shouted, "We’d better surrender!"

"NOBODY SURRENDERS HERE!" yelled Camilo Cienfuegos, a wild, wiry young soldier. Camilo answered the ultimatum with a blast of his submachine gun, cursing at the enemy troops as he thrust himself back into the battle.

Captain Almeida, who also refused to entertain the notion of surrender, rushed over to Che. "Leave me, they’ve killed me," Che pleaded. Almeida refused to abandon Che and, with help from Ramiro Valdés, carried him off the field, heading toward a thicket that would provide them with some highly demanded cover. Soon after Che fled the battlefield, low-flying planes strafed the rebel positions again, sowing even greater confusion among the retreating rebels. The Cuban army then set fire to the cane in an effort to smoke the rebels out. With smoke and flames rising from the cane fields behind them, Almeida led Che and three other men into some wooded ground, having survived a dreadful, thirty-minute baptism of fire.

The Cuban army routed Castro’s rebel army at Alegría del Pío. Without much effort and at the cost of only one dead, two Rural Guard companies had broken up Castro’s rebels into twenty-six separate groups, some of which consisted of only one soldier. Within a day or two the army hunted down and executed twenty-one rebels. The army captured and imprisoned another twenty-three, and another nineteen rebels disappeared. Only sixteen of the eighty-two men who landed from the Granma survived the battle of Alegría del Pío and the army’s subsequent pursuit.

Yet two years later, the survivors of that disaster marched triumphantly into Havana as liberators, among them Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, Raúl Castro, Juan Almeida, and Ramiro Valdés. Their survival was attributable to their good fortune and the army’s bad judgment. Before the battle of Alegría del Pío, the army had pulled back its ambush at La Esperanza, where army units could have ambushed rebels attempting to move into the Sierra Maestra. Batista called off the pursuit on December 13, having concluded that Castro had been killed and his army crushed. Batista withdrew his combat units from the Sierra Maestra and canceled aerial surveillance, leaving a path to the sierra open to any rebel fortunate enough to have eluded army patrols for eight days.

Nevertheless, if Fidel Castro had continued to pursue the same strategy and tactics that had led his men directly into an army ambush just three days after their arrival, Batista’s army would have crushed him. By publicly announcing that he would invade Cuba by the end of the year, Castro provided Batista with an opportunity to place troops in position to defeat the invaders. Although Castro’s declaration could have been a ruse—and General Francisco Tabernilla, the Cuban army chief of staff, publicly dismissed it as such—Batista nevertheless ordered warships and aircraft to patrol the coast from Pinar del Río to Oriente, and placed army and rural guard garrisons on alert. Castro’s declaration lifted the cover off his invasion force and vitiated the strategy behind the diversionary strikes. Batista expected Castro’s landing and had sent reinforcements to Oriente province before the Santiago uprising on November 30.

Castro, like Che and other rebel commanders, would learn from the costly mistakes that had led to Alegría del Pío. A brilliant and charismatic political leader, Fidel lacked training and faith in unconventional warfare, which explains why he opted for guerrilla warfare only after he landed in the wrong place and at the wrong time. The seasoned rebel troops who came down from the mountains two years later would not have withered under enemy fire as had the rebels at Alegría del Pío. Two years of combat in the mountains turned idealistic rebels into veteran guerrillas. But from the swamp to Alegría del Pío, the rebels left a trail of cane stalks and followed a treasonous peasant, who helped to lead the army to Castro’s encampment. Castro selected a poor location to rest, failed to post sentries, and did not make arrangements for an orderly retreat. When the firing commenced, the rebels scattered in every direction and Castro could not regroup them. He lost more than 75 percent of his men as a result.

If Castro had come to Cuba with the intention of fighting a guerrilla war, he surely did not act like it. The war he launched from a swamp was overt, anticipated, and conventional. Che learned from the Granma how not to launch a guerrilla campaign. The first guerrilla band should be organized by a handful of conspirators, "without mass support or knowledge," Che explained in Guerrilla Warfare. "Absolute secrecy, a total absence of information in the enemy’s hands, should be the primary base of the movement."

The Granma rebels who followed Fidel across the Caribbean lacked the training, strength, and secrecy required for launching any hostilities, whether a guerrilla campaign or conventional operations. Yet they trusted Fidel’s military judgment, convinced that they would somehow drive Batista out of office. Only a handful of trusted advisers knew that behind Fidel’s strategy was the assumption that a combination of conventional and unconventional strikes against the Batista regime would spark a mass uprising. Castro did not believe that his rebel force, by itself, could topple Batista in one decisive blow. If other anti-Batista forces, including, and perhaps especially, disaffected military units, did not join the insurrection, Castro planned to implement his contingency plan, calling for his troops to reassemble in the Sierra Maestra, from where they would launch a guerrilla campaign.

At the outset of the Cuban insurrection, Castro’s strategic planning placed more emphasis on conventional warfare than on a guerrilla campaign. He and his close advisers, including Che, believed that the Batista regime lacked the strength and legitimacy to withstand coordinated uprisings. The rebels believed that they could initiate the disintegration of the Batista regime with a few decisive strikes. Che later explained how he first envisioned the triumph that would follow the invasion of Cuba: "We all thought about arriving at some place in Cuba and after a few cries, several heroic battles, a few radio broadcasts and several deaths, we would expel dictator Batista and achieve power." The Granma rebels did not conceive of themselves as a foco, as Guevara later defined a guerrilla band, and they did not initially intend to launch a guerrilla campaign against Batista. They conceived of themselves as the spearhead of a broadly based insurrectionary movement that would topple the dictatorship with attacks on military garrisons, general strikes, and guerrilla warfare. The Cuban insurrection became a guerrilla campaign but it began with a conventional attack supplemented by some unorthodox assaults on well-fortified positions. The rebels never envisioned an armed struggle based principally in the mountains. According to Faustino Pérez, one of Fidel’s two chiefs of staff, the Granma rebels intended to spark a general insurrection with attacks, strikes, and sabotage on urban and rural fronts.

The success of this ambitious plan hinged on the ability of urban militants to pin down the Cuban army in Havana and Santiago long enough to convince Batista and his generals that they faced a nationwide insurrection rather than just an invasion force of eighty-two men in Oriente province. Batista would not likely vacate the Havana or Santiago garrisons to engage Castro in Oriente if Castro did not secure the two largest cities. Castro had negotiated an alliance with the Directorio Revolucionario (DR, Revolutionary Directorate), an insurrectionary group based at the University of Havana, but he did not command those units. In fact, mutual suspicions weakened the alliance between the two organizations, which partly explains why the DR remained inactive on November 30. Castro could only depend on a handful of militants, led by Frank País. However, País could not strike Moncada unless and until he captured enough arms and ammunition to mount a full-scale assault on Moncada with civilian volunteers. In the initial assault on the police station, País commanded twenty-eight rebels. If the people of Santiago did not join the uprising, the badly outgunned and outnumbered rebels could not mount a viable attack on the one thousand troops stationed at Moncada. Although the Santiago rebels only had to divert the Cuban army away from Castro’s invasion forces, their strategy, like Castro’s, still assumed that thousands of Cubans would immediately join them in rebellion against Batista.
Castro borrowed his military strategy from a traditional and conventional source: José Martí, who led Cuba’s third war for independence in 1895. Martí had organized a rebel army in Florida and planned to invade eastern Cuba on three yachts sailing from Fernandina Beach, near Jacksonville. Martí intended to coordinate his invasion with a general uprising on the island, thereby preventing the Spanish army and navy from concentrating its superior forces against the widely scattered rebel units. Spanish and American authorities uncovered Martí’s plot and seized the three vessels on January 14, 1895.

Undeterred, Martí authorized secret revolutionary cells in Cuba to launch the insurrection on February 25, 1895. The Spanish authorities crushed that conspiracy too. Martí eventually slipped into Cuba six weeks later on a small boat, and he came, not with an invading army, but with General Máximo Gómez and four other men in a quiet, covert operation, undetected by the Spanish naval patrols.

Castro adopted an honored military strategy from Cuba’s greatest patriot for the compelling political reason of linking himself to Martí. However, instead of adopting the covert plan that had worked, Castro borrowed the insurrectionary plan that had failed. Martí’s experiences had demonstrated that scattered groups of rebels could infiltrate the island safely and relatively easily, while larger, overt operations offered easy prey to the authorities. Castro wanted to accomplish what Martí had failed to do, despite overwhelming logistical barriers. His strategy required absolute secrecy, precise timing, and effective coordination of units in two countries. Castro had to maintain secure lines of communication with his allies in Santiago and Havana, particularly during the twelve-hundred-mile odyssey of the Granma from Tuxpan to Oriente province. Once the Granma left port, however, Castro could not transmit radio messages to the island. If something went wrong and the diversionary strikes did not succeed, he could not alter or postpone his plans. He could not even communicate with his own men by radio or walkie-talkie. As a result, Castro lost command and control of his rebel army when navigational errors or enemy fire forced them into swamps and cane fields. In his first three days back on Cuban soil, Castro knew little about the strength or location of his enemies or his allies.

The absence of communications equipment did not deter Castro or his men. Even though he could not transmit or receive messages to or from Celia Sánchez about the delivery of critical supplies and reinforcements, Castro pinned his initial hopes on an amphibious landing followed by an attack on the nearest army garrison. He faced formidable statistical and logistical odds. Che Guevara recognized the weaknesses in Castro’s military strategy. Soon after meeting Fidel in July 1955, Guevara expressed grave concerns about the prospects for success. "What do you think of this crazy idea of the Cubans, invading an island completely defended by coastal artillery?" Guevara once asked Hilda Gadea, his first wife. Guevara enlisted enthusiastically in the rebel army anyway—with Gadea’s support.

Guevara, like so many other rebels who enlisted in the rebel army, eventually developed a conviction that with bold, courageous, and determined leadership, the rebels could inspire a nationwide rebellion and overthrow Batista. Castro had tried and failed in his assault against the Moncada army barracks in 1953, but he still had enough power and charisma to raise another rebel army for another attack on terms that still favored the Cuban army. Instead of attacking the weak points in the enemy’s armor first, Castro launched his second rebellion in the same way that he initiated the first, with an attack on strong army and police units in Santiago. Although Castro’s 1956 strategy called for the main body to hit a relatively easy target in Niquero, the campaign would once again begin with an attack in Santiago, on ground and terms chosen by his enemy.

To Castro’s credit, he developed a contingency plan to regroup his rebel forces and launch a guerrilla campaign from the Sierra Maestra if he failed to take the Niquero garrisons. Yet Castro clearly preferred a victory through quick and rather conventional strikes to the more daunting prospect of victory through a protracted guerrilla campaign. Castro questioned the viability and potential of guerrilla warfare. If his initial strikes had generated the popular uprising he had anticipated, he might have rolled into Santiago at the head of a conventional army a few short weeks after the Granma landing. As it turned out, he rolled into Havana two years after the Granma landing at the head of a guerrilla army whose most accomplished commander was Ernesto Che Guevara.

Although Che Guevara had mastered the theory of guerrilla warfare in Mexico, he (and Castro) perfected the practice of it in the Sierra Maestra. Abstract concepts became hard realities at Alegría del Pío, where the disaster left no doubt that the initial strategy contradicted fundamental principles of guerrilla warfare. From these negative experiences Guevara developed the basic tenets that he subsequently elaborated in Guerrilla Warfare: "The fundamental principle is that no battle, combat, or skirmish is to be fought unless it will be won." In the initial phase of a guerrilla campaign, "the essential task of the guerrilla fighter is to keep himself from being destroyed." Guevara learned these painful truths three days after the Granma landed. To launch his guerrilla campaign in Bolivia in 1966, he dispatched small rebel units around the continent and assembled them in eastern Bolivia, a textbook example of covert infiltration. A credible guerrilla campaign did not begin with the Granma’s departure, an overt shipment of men and matériel across twelve hundred miles of hostile waters. There was no certainty of victory in Castro’s strategy; complete annihilation was the more likely outcome.

Although Batista had only a few units trained in counterinsurgency warfare, he had more than enough resources to crush any conventional attacks. The Cuban army consisted of forty thousand troops divided into eight regiments stationed at each of the provincial capitals. In Oriente, the Antonio Maceo Regiment maintained operational headquarters in Santiago and Holguín, with Rural Guard units scattered throughout the towns and villages of Oriente. In western Oriente, where Castro intended to land, Niquero, Media Luna, Campechuela, Manzanillo, and Pilón were defended by at least a company of rural guardsmen (one hundred men). From these bases, the Cuban army was ideally positioned to send out multiple search-and-destroy missions against Castro’s rebel army. In addition, the army could call in air and naval support to locate and destroy the invading army. Cuba’s air forces included a bomber squadron of twenty B-26s, a fighter squadron of seventeen F-47s and eight T-33 jet trainers, and a transport squadron of thirty-three mixed aircraft, including eleven C-47s. The navy could deploy up to a dozen small submarine chasers, several World War II–era PT boats, and several small gunboats for coastal defense.

In addition to the advantage in material resources, the Cuban army had more accurate and reliable intelligence. From the moment the Cuban rebels began training in Mexico, they attracted Mexican, Cuban, and American intelligence agents. The Mexican police first raided Castro’s training camp in June 1956 and, in collaboration with Cuban and American agents, continued to track the movements of the rebels for the following five months. On November 21, three days before the Cubans assembled at Tuxpan, Mexican police arrested three Cuban conspirators and then gave Castro seventy-two hours to leave the country. Mexican police dutifully reported to the Cuban government that Castro and his men were about to leave Mexico. Armed with that information, the Cuban army placed all army and Rural Guard outposts on alert and ordered constant surveillance of the coast from Pinar del Río in the west to Oriente province in the east. The only thing that Batista did not know was the precise location of Castro’s intended disembarkation.

The military strategy that ultimately led the rebels to victory was covert, unpredictable, and unconventional. The survivors of Alegría del Pío applied basic rules of guerrilla strategy and tactics because Castro’s more conventional approach failed. Fortunately for Fidel, his best guerrilla commander and strategist—Che Guevara—survived the battle and guided the transition of the rebels from a conventional insurrectionary force into the most accomplished guerrilla army in twentieth-century Latin America. The recovery of Castro’s army and its subsequent success was attributable in no small part to the training, strategy, and leadership provided by Ernesto Guevara.

Despite the deluge of biographies, memoirs, and documentaries that appeared on the thirtieth anniversary of Guevara’s death in 1997, none of the recent analysts has reexamined Guevara’s career as a guerrilla soldier, military commander, and revolutionary theorist. New evidence has come to light, including some of Guevara’s previously unpublished campaign diaries and declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents. These new sources can be used to reevaluate Guevara’s fame and impact as a guerrilla warrior and theorist. In the 1960s, several scholars debunked Guevara’s contributions to the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare, but around the world, Guevara was and is still ranked in the pantheon of the great guerrilla theorists, along with Colonel T. E. Lawrence, Mao Tse-tung, Augusto César Sandino, and General Vo Nguyen Giap.

The aim of this study is to evaluate Guevara’s record as a guerrilla soldier, commander, and theorist, from his first skirmish in Cuba to his defeat in Bolivia eleven years later. How did Guevara perform in battle, as a soldier and as a commander? Were his theories of guerrilla warfare sound and applicable? The examination of these and other questions will separate the mythical Guevara from the real guerrilla, the doctor who received his baptism of fire at Alegría del Pío, drafted a revolutionary doctrine of guerrilla warfare, and died fighting for his ideals in Bolivia. The objective is to examine Guevara’s complete military record—as a soldier, commander, and theorist—and draw conclusions based on the best available evidence.

With a nod to both Guevara’s critics and admirers, the record indicates that Che was underrated as a conventional military strategist, overrated as a guerrilla commander, and often misrepresented as a guerrilla theorist. Che achieved his greatest military victory by applying a conventional military strategy in his campaign to take the city of Santa Clara (November–December 1958). Widely regarded as an offensive and aggressive commander, he orchestrated a brilliant defensive campaign during the army’s summer offensive of 1958. As a guerrilla commander, he scored impressive victories in ambush after ambush in Cuba and later in Bolivia, but he rarely commanded more than one hundred troops in battle. The strategies and tactics he presented in Guerrilla Warfare did not substantially deviate from the doctrines advocated by other strategists, and he violated most of his own precepts during his disastrous Bolivian campaign (1966–67). Credited with developing foco theory, Che never attempted to devise a new theory of guerrilla warfare. He wanted to practice guerrilla warfare, and during a relatively brief military career (1956–67), he practiced it more than he theorized about it. Che was a man of action rather than theory. He fought on the front lines, commanded his own columns, trained guerrillas, and organized guerrilla fronts in almost every Latin American country.

The fact that Che served under and took orders from Fidel Castro does not diminish the value of his contributions to revolutionary strategies and practices. For most of the campaign in the Sierra Maestra, Che served as the rebel army’s top military strategist. Fidel, after six months and several skirmishes as the field commander, eventually ceded tactical military command to Che and his other military subordinates, Raúl Castro, Juan Almeida, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Ramiro Valdés. Fidel directed general insurrectionary strategy, but even there, he sought and accepted advice and criticism from Che, whom he regarded as his best strategist and commander, despite Che’s overly aggressive tendencies in battle.

Moreover, it was Che—not Castro—who literally wrote the book on guerrilla warfare. The manual of that title, which served as the basic text for Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, exposed a truth that had been concealed during the insurrection: Che Guevara was the principal architect of Castro’s military strategy. He undoubtedly learned and benefited from Castro; Fidel certainly profited from the military advice and leadership provided by Che. Ironically, Ernesto Guevara never studied military affairs formally. In Chapters 2 and 3, I will examine how Che developed from a medical doctor into a revolutionary and a guerrillero, identifying the events and people that shaped his principles and strategies. A well-read intellectual with a sharp analytical mind, Guevara discovered an inclination and aptitude for armed conflict, learning quickly from Castro’s initial military fiasco and developing into Fidel Castro’s trusted and most accomplished guerrilla commander. In Chapters 4 through 6, I analyze Guevara’s record as a soldier and comandante in Cuba, from his earliest days as the army’s medical doctor to the triumphant commander of the rebel forces that took Santa Clara and forced the resignation of Fulgencio Batista.

Guevara’s education in guerrilla warfare did not begin or end in Cuba. In 1954 he witnessed the quick and easy collapse of Jacobo Arbenz’s revolutionary regime in Guatemala. From that experience he learned to expect a counterrevolution sponsored by the United States. When he marched into Havana in January 1959, he knew what had to be done to consolidate a radical revolution. If and when the United States intervened militarily, Guevara intended to wage a defensive guerrilla campaign against the occupying forces. Thus, Che wrote Guerrilla Warfare primarily as an instruction manual for the Cuban army and militia, but he also intended to teach other Latin American revolutionaries how to wage unconventional warfare. Guerrilla Warfare, however, does not represent Guevarism in full bloom. Che devoted his later years to the development and implementation of a tricontinental strategy of insurrection supported by an international fighting front. The strategies and tactics conveyed in Guerrilla Warfare are neither innovative nor dangerous. Guevara’s tricontinental strategy, explained so passionately in his "Message to the Tricontinental" represented something new and radical in revolutionary circles, which explains why so many self-proclaimed revolutionaries denounced it then. Guevarism, the subject of Chapters 7 and 8, was a tricontinental revolutionary strategy that began with a guerrilla foco and ended with a total war against imperialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

In the three final chapters, I examine the project that consumed and ultimately defeated Che Guevara: the execution of his tricontinental strategy. Unsatisfied and even slightly uncomfortable as a bureaucrat, Guevara left Cuba to apply his revolutionary doctrines in the field. By that time, American military strategists, diplomats, and intelligence agents had studied his writings as carefully as had any Latin American revolutionaries. They adapted their counterinsurgency strategies to meet and defeat the challenge of Guevarism. Guevara unwittingly compelled his enemy to develop more effective counterinsurgency strategies and tactics, innovations that ultimately defeated him. Guevara also failed partly because friends and allies let him down. He advocated international solidarity when there was none; he practiced revolution when too many revolutionaries preferred simply to talk about it.

Few people, however, could have predicted that an asthmatic, twenty-eight-year-old doctor from Argentina, with only a few months of a basic military education, would have developed into one of the world’s most famous guerrilla commanders and strategists. His image alone, more than thirty years after his death, remains powerful enough to capture the rebellious spirit of Guevara and the generation of revolutionaries he inspired.

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