Killing Castro - Lawrence Block [30]
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