“They make landfall, and they’re ambushed at Alegría de Pío—”
“It was not an ambush,” I said. “In an ambush, the attacking force selects the site ahead of time. They prepare the kill zone, wait for the enemy to pass . . .”
“Yes, sorry, Papá.”
“. . . and then slaughter them with immediate, heavy, and accurate fire.”
“I . . .”
“A well-executed ambush is an act of premeditated murder and terrorism against strangers. In a well-executed ambush, with the right planning and surprise, the victims aren’t killed in a fair fight.”
“I just meant that it’s truly incredible . . .”
“They don’t have the chance to fight at all. That was not what happened. Che didn’t walk into a trap. He was sitting around, eating a sausage—”
This is true. By daybreak, the men were begging for rest. Their equally lazy commanders permitted them to sleep through the morning hours, after which they looked up to the heavens and saw military aircraft circling above. Even then, they continued peacefully eating sugarcane as the planes circled. Imagine it—you’ve come to work revolution and, threatened by military aircraft seeking your death, you decide to suck on sugarcane like a child.
As the planes flew lower and slower, Che didn’t eat sugarcane. He shoved sausage into his mouth. The first shots rang out. One frightened comrade dropped a box of ammunition. A fat guerrillero tried to hide behind a single stalk of sugarcane. Another kept calling absurdly for silence amid the gunfire. Che himself faced a question—grab a backpack of medicine or a case of ammunition. In his diary, Che described it as an existential choice between his life as a doctor or as a fighter. He grabbed the ammo, and was promptly shot in the chest. When another guerrillero, shot through the lungs, asked the brave Che, his doctor, for help, Che admits he did nothing for the man, telling him, “indifferently,” that he’d been shot, too.
Most were killed. The few who managed to crawl away walked until the darkness became too deep to continue, and then they huddled together like dogs and slept, starving and thirsty, a bloody feast for mosquitoes.
“But they started with eighty-two men,” my daughter continues, “and right away sixty were killed or captured. And they kept going. Even though Che was shot. Even though he thought he was going to die.”
“That impresses you? Trust me, it’s not particularly difficult to get shot through the chest if you’re a moron in a war zone.”
After dinner, I grabbed Jorge Domínguez’s history of Cuba from my shelf and dropped it on Valencia’s desk with a thud. For added measure, I brought out Che’s Bolivian diaries and then, as an afterthought, a first edition of the African diaries, the ones with the introduction from none other than Colombia’s native literary genius and political idiot, Gabriel García Márquez. Finally, I handed her a stapled-together report from 1967, one of the CIA’s Latin America documents that had been declassified in the ’90s and which, in ways that were both revelatory and infuriating, made it clear why the CIA was blindly happy to let Che’s diaries loose into the world. In its own way, it was as perfect an example of deliberate ignorance as Che’s Guerrilla Warfare. As I left the room, I told her what to read, and in what order.
She was still reading Che’s way, seeing this idiocy as their baptism, a proof of their hardiness, their ability to regroup and forge a new rebel army out of sheer will. That’s why in Guerrilla Warfare Che champions self-sufficiency of an extreme sort. The guerrilla band must live off the land, like he did, desperate and isolated but creating revolutionary momentum as a product of his own heroic struggle. But had Castro actually tried this strategy, they all would have died in Cuba.
When I returned, Sofia was sitting, drinking an aromática in our parlor. “Are you going to let me in on your game?” she asked. “Because I’m not sure you’re winning.”
“Wait,” I said.
The books, read properly, would tell a very different story. How after the disaster, Castro reached out to Frank País, leader of the July 26th Movement in Cuba, who sent arms and support to the mountain guerrillas for years. So much for self-sufficiency.
As for the brave guerrilleros inspiring revolutionary fervor, well . . . the country was already rebelling. And not just in the countryside. There was the students’ group, Directorio Revolucionario, attacking the Presidential Palace. There was the Cienfuegos naval uprising. The general strike of 1958. An army officer, Colonel Barquín, launched plots against the regime from within the military. The elected and then overthrown president Carlos Prío financed attack after attack against the regime. He even financed Castro, providing the mountain guerrillas yet another urban tit to suckle.
Castro was late to the revolutionary party, but the Batista regime, concerned with more dangerous enemies than a group of incompetents in the mountains, crushed his true rivals for him. José Antonio Echeverría, gunned down after an attack on the headquarters of Radio Reloj, March 1957. Fructuoso Rodríguez, ambushed by the police and shot to death, April 1957. And then Frank País, captured, brought to the Callejón de Muro and shot in the back of the head, July 1957.
Castro didn’t come to power as the triumphant head of a unified movement sweeping in from the countryside, electrifying the country with communist fervor. He came to power by process of elimination, picking up the pieces of the movements who’d done more to weaken the regime than his men had. Then, once he had power, Castro crushed his rivals more ruthlessly than Batista ever had, and instituted a new history, a founding myth.
At the Museum of the Revolution in Havana you can learn, I am told, of how a small band of guerrilleros inspired the whole country not just to revolution, but to communism. And because Castro held power, and because the excitement of liberation was still in the air, and because Castro was perfectly willing to jail or murder dissenters, the myth
