double-barreled shotguns used for doves. They followed him because there was no one else to follow. They followed him because whatever was said of him, this much was true: he had a big set of balls.
'Companions,' he said, 'fellow crusaders. Tonight is the night of nights. Perhaps we die, perhaps we triumph. But we will not pass without having made the ultimate attempt. Companions, brothers, long live freedom! Long live Cuba!'
He was best at moments like that. Perhaps his true gift was the ability to put into simple, rugged language those things they all felt, and by doing that, become the vessel of their emotions.
They raised their rifles and cheered by the light of campfires in the barnyard, and then there was nothing left to say. They went to their cars, twenty-six in all, rickety old vehicles, some barely drivable, and climbed in three or four to each one, and off they went.
He was in the second car. He drove. Nobody talked, though some men smoked. The convoy, obeying rules of traffic, not politics, accordioned this way and that, expanding and contracting as it went over the dusty roads, found the slope, passed through the outskirts of Cuba's second largest city, rotated around the traffic circle, and headed down the Victoriano Garzon for Avenue Moncada and the future, whatever it might bring.
He worried that the man ahead would lose his way. He worried that the cars would lose contact with each other and wander, the whole unit breaking down into nothingness. He worried that he would be a coward. He worried that nothing would go as planned, that he would be captured and the legendary Ojos Bellos, whom all knew of and all feared, might cut his eyes out and make him sing a song of defeat and surrender and betrayal. He worried that he would die a forgotten nobody, and all his dreams and all his convictions of destiny and change and power would disappear for naught.
They drove through streets sleepy but not as sleepy as he had imagined. He thought that by now everybody would be drunk or in bed with a new partner. Yet it was still surprisingly crowded. Now and then a soul would notice this strange parade of beat-up old vehicles rumbling through the streets and watch, wide-mouthed, wondering at meanings. Still, no alarm was given, no commotion created. If the assemblage confirmed certain rumors, the cars outraced them to their destination.
They rolled onward into the night.
In the way that time collapses when that which is anticipated and seems forever away is suddenly upon you, they turned right off of the central thoroughfare of Victoriano Garzon and down the Avenue Moncada, passing the military hospital on the left, then a number of small wooden officers' houses, buried in trees, and finally, at the intersection, arrived at Checkpoint 3, access to the barracks. The building itself loomed ahead at the oblique, the castellated ramparts visible in the night, so that it looked like something the great Don Quixote himself would charge, lance ready, heart athrob. Its yellow-and-white color scheme stood out in lighting from the porch that ran along its front. A low wall surrounded it, a parade ground lay to one side of it, and only a gate-house marked it off from the rest of the world. It housed a thousand men, but tonight, or so the plan assumed, they would all be drunk.
The plan was simple, and at least it was a plan. The first car sped ahead, opening a distance between itself and the rest of the column. As it went, Castro prayed to God in his heaven that the advantage of surprise-his only advantage-was to be protected.
He slowed to a creep, the speed of a man walking, as ahead, the first car reached the checkpoint, and six men leapt out in the best of the uniforms.
'Make way for the general!' shouted Guitart, their leader, 'open the gate for the general.'
It worked, almost magically. The three guards snapped into a present-arms in honor of the general and as they froze, their old rifles locked in place vertically against their chests, they were overcome and disarmed. Guitart and his party shoved them ahead and went inside to open the gate.
And then, just as magically, it fell apart. Castro saw chaos and disaster emerge in the form of three men, two soldiers with American submachine guns and a sergeant with a pistol at his belt. They shouldn't have been there, but they were, and so it goes in the affairs of men and revolutions. They were evidently on some sort of perimeter patrol, and stopped abruptly and just stared at what they could see and no one else could: a line of twenty-five cars creeping along, lights out, jammed with men.
He had no choice but an act of sudden, stunning violence. He had no hesitation. He veered savagely, running up onto the pavement, bouncing over the curb, turning on his headlights and pinning the three in the glare. They panicked, but it was too late, and he rammed into them, knocking them asunder, felt the ragged jolt as the car crushed against them. Weapons flew, bodies flew.
But not the sergeant. He alone was quick enough or sober enough to react, and rolled to the right, just a hair, and the charging vehicle did not hit him.
Castro leapt out; the sergeant had to be stopped.
But he was gone, except for the sounds of his pistol, which he had drawn as he fled, firing off seven rounds as fast as he could and screaming 'Assalto! Assalto!'
He was the hero, not Castro, for in that moment the entire complexion of the event changed.
Castro, out of the car, saw that he was too late, but still thought that if the column moved quickly it could penetrate the barracks, bring fire on the soldiers, overwhelm them with fear, cajole them into dropping their arms, and therefore take over the city.
But he turned now and saw chaos. When he leapt from his car, that was the signal-he had forgotten. All the other cars halted, and the men now poured from them, rifles and shotguns at the ready, hungry for the battle that now seemed destined not to occur in the barracks itself, but here on the Avenue Moncada at a kind of forty-five- degree angle to the barracks.
'The cars!' he screamed. 'You must get back into the cars!'
It began slowly. A shot spanged off the hood of a car, and then another, and then another. The noise was almost more terrifying than the prospect of death, for when the bullets fired, their noise filled the air and beat against the eardrums, and in the next second, they smacked into automobile metal with a vibratory clang.
Castro saw that now was the only moment he would have.
'Attack!' he cried. 'Open fire! Kill the bastards.'
With that he ran to the front of his own wrecked vehicle, seized a machine pistol from the ground where one of the two now moaning soldiers had tossed it in the moment of his ugly smashing, turned and pointed it at the windows and doors looming ahead to the left, and unleashed a roar as he emptied the magazine in one shuddering, lurching burst.
A few men raced past him, rushed through the checkpoint, and began to move in on the barracks. But a blast of fire from the windows drove them back or pinned them down.
All along the line, the rebels retreated to their vehicles and fired, their.22 and shotgun blasts filling the air. The whole side of the corner of Moncada seemed to dance as the rebel rounds tore against it, blowing out windows, pulverizing the facade. And then, as if a storm had spent itself, the men stopped shooting, all reaching the end of their magazines in the same second.
The soldiers by this time were fully awakened. An officer inside must have realized what was happening and rallied them. By whatever presence, at each window and doorway it seemed three men appeared, each with a rifle, and each shooting as fast as he could.
Now it was a torrent of fire from the building, and it was the cars that shuddered when hit by the fusillade. Windows smeared, then shattered, tires flattened, shocks gave up. The cars, like dying animals, settled brokenly toward the pavement, screams arose from the hit, a man or two fell limp and dead.
Castro struggled with the machine gun, got another magazine from the soldier's belt into it, and again sprayed the building. He watched his bullets dance along, and for a moment was buoyed by the power he unleashed, having in his mind a recent event where the power of the guns was directed only at him.
But then the soldiers above opened fire, and he dropped in a blizzard of detonations, as rifle rounds from a hundred weapons sought him out.
'What do we do?' someone asked.
'We must be strong! We must be brave. We must hold. Guitart is inside. He will attack them from the rear.'
But at that moment a squad of soldiers broke from the barracks, headed across the street and began to work their way along the wall, where they had another angle from which to fire at the gaggle of revolutionaries. Shots began to bang this way and that off the cars. From somewhere farther out in the parade ground, a machine gun
