“He is old and quiet,” Moreno said. “El Viejo, the old one. Toothless and harmless, no? You may see that his hand is inside the jacket of his suit. There is a gun in his hand. He knows me. Otherwise you would have been shot before you entered this house.”
“I’m impressed,” Turner said.
The door opened. A woman, stout and matronly, smiled benignly at them. She stepped inside, murmured something polite and let them pass. She had hair the color of a gray flannel suit. A thin scar ran from the corner of her mouth halfway to her eye. It looked to Turner as though it had been made by a knife. Moreno introduced her as Señora Luchar. She mumbled something pleasant again and went off to find coffee. She brought a tray of demitasse cups that were small without being dainty. The coffee was very thick, very hot, very black. Turner liked it.
Moreno finished his coffee and left. He took a long time to finish the coffee and a longer time to leave. He kept speaking in Spanish to the woman, telling her how important the task of the two Americans was, telling her to render them all possible assistance. The woman—Señora Luchar—listened to all of this with no expression. Finally Moreno was gone. Señora Luchar followed him to the door, bolted it, watched the man drive away.
“Un momento, Señora—”
She turned to Turner. “Let’s speak English,” she said briskly. “Your accent is impossible. What’s on your mind?”
“Uh—”
“Moreno’s a fool,” she said. “A useful fool, but still a fool. You didn’t know I spoke English? I lived in Miami, for five years. Political exile. My family didn’t get along with Batista. His men pulled out my old man’s fingernails. They cut off his testicles, gouged out his eyes, raped my mother and slit her throat. They raped me, too, but they let me go.”
“And now you want to kill Castro?”
“I don’t like dictators. Fascist or Marxist, I don’t like dictators. You two sleep in the cellar. Want to see your room? Follow me.”
They followed her.
FOUR
July 26, 1953.
With his briefs ignored by Batista’s courts, with freedom of speech and freedom of the press forcibly suppressed throughout Cuba, Fidel Castro decided that only revolution would settle the issues at stake—the issues of freedom and liberty. He began meeting with friends in an apartment house in the Vedado district of Havana, planning a military operation which would excite the common people of Cuba and spark a revolt to send Fulgencio Batista running from the island.
The revolutionaries were a small group, a tiny band of idealists and heroes, and, some say, Communists. Ambassador William Pauley has stated on the Jack Paar Show that he heard Castro, very early in his career, proclaim that when it came it would be a Communist revolution. The capital at their disposal was minimal. The men themselves mortgaged their homes, sold their furniture, pawned their watches and their wives’ jewelry, gave up whatever they had in order to place as much money as possible at Castro’s disposal. They armed themselves with pistols and knives; some carried rifles and shotguns. They had no grenades, no explosives. They were, in all, a total force of one hundred seventy men. Their objective, initially, was the fortress at Moncada at Santiago, a fortress quartering somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred armed troops.
Castro set out for Santiago by automobile and stayed at a friend’s house in the center of the city. On July 25th, more of the revolutionaries began drifting east, converging on the city. Fidel met with them at ten that night, coordinating the attack, synchronizing plans.
The attack commenced the next morning. The revolutionaries moved through Santiago in groups. One task force was dispatched to capture the radio station, preparing to call upon the people of Santiago to join in the revolt and take arms against the government. Another group moved to occupy the Santiago hospital, to hold it in preparation for the care of wounded on both sides. The major group launched an onslaught against the Moncada Fortress.
But the uprising, nobly conceived and fearlessly put into execution, was smashed almost at once. Castro’s little band was undermanned and under-equipped. The radio station was not taken, and the bulk of the citizens of the town were not aware that a rebellion was in progress until it had already been put down.
At Moncada, Castro’s followers fought staunchly in the face of impossible odds, but they were too thoroughly outnumbered to have much effect. Batista’s army retained control, and the rebels scattered for their lives.
Many were killed in the fighting. Others, captured, never reached prison; they were killed on the spot by Batista’s troops. Fidel himself, and his younger brother Raul as well, narrowly missed execution in this manner. Only because the army officer who captured him had been a classmate of his at Havana was he delivered to the civilian authorities instead of being put to death at once.
Castro acted as his own attorney in the trial held that September. He told the court that an attorney appointed by the Havana Bar Association had not been permitted to see him while he was in jail, that he himself had been denied access to documents important to his defense. Nevertheless he made an impassioned and eloquent plea to the court, lashing out against the excesses of the Batista regime, presenting his projected reforms, criticizing the inequality and oppression which he saw around him throughout Cuba. His defense, doomed from the start, since the courts were in Batista’s hands, was not successful. It had no chance.
But his speech was successful. People listened to the tall young man with the firm voice. People who had never known Castro existed began to take him into their hearts as a leader. The trial, designed by Batista to squelch the resistance forever, had an opposite effect. It increased Castro’s following. And Fidel himself saw with greater confidence something he had already learned at the University of Havana: when he spoke, Cubans listened.
“I end my defense,” he told the court, “but I shall not do it as lawyers always do, asking for the defendant’s liberty. I cannot ask for this when my companions are already suffering imprisonment on the Isle of Pines. Send me to join them and to share their fate. It is inconceivable that honest men are dead or jailed in a republic unless the President is a criminal or thief.
“As for me, I know that jail will be hard as it has never been for anyone else, pregnant with threats and with cowardly ferociousness. But I do not fear it as I do not fear the fury of the wretched tyrant who has already torn away the life of seventy brothers.
“Condemn me! It does not matter! History will absolve me!”
The judges may or may not have been impressed; there is no way to tell. But, whether or not history would absolve Fidel Castro, they had no intention of so doing. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison on the Isle of Pines.
Prison can be an end or a beginning. For Fidel, the time spent on the Isle of Pines was not time to be wasted. With Raul and his other comrades in arms, he maintained strict revolutionary discipline, sang songs of rebellion and planned for the future. Castro organized a school in prison, teaching his fellow prisoners history and philosophy. The cheers and loyalty of followers was something he was accustomed to now, something he needed. He would drive himself to impossible extremes to serve those persons who, he felt, were counting on him.
But his activities with his fellow prisoners only aggravated the government. He was isolated, made to serve what amounted to solitary confinement. Still the young man from Oriente refused to waste his time. He read constantly, poring over every book he could get on Cuban history and the age-old fight for Cuban independence. He waited for his release from prison and planned a rise to power.