Fidel ennobles the Cuban history in his book
Fidel greeted Melba first, with a kiss and an embrace, and then moved on little by little, dedicating a warm comment to each and everyone, a joyful gesture. Fidel looked very happy in this reencounter with his comrades from a struggle that has lasted all his life: Ramirito, Guillermo, Furry, Polito, Espinosa, Efigenio, Quinta Solá, Lussón...He called them by their first names, from time to time tapping his forehead as if each face was bringing back recollections of the past. "Organizing my memories," he would say later, when talking of the intensive searching through documents that he needed to write La victoria estratégica (The Strategic Victory), the book that he was launching (August 2) before his "boys", those who accompanied on the first and all the subsequent combats, those who, right now, have returned to being just 15, 20, 30 years old. Like Teté Puebla, who was just 16 years old when she began to collaborate with Celia Sánchez. But, we’ll return to this at the end.
Katiuska Blanco, the researcher responsible for editing Por todos los caminos de la Sierra: La victoria estratégica, which is the title that appears on the cover, commenced the book launch. "He really began writing in the Sierra Maestra, in a heroic fashion, when they were 300 combatants against 10,000 soldiers from Batista’s army. Although those who initially confronted the offensive were fewer in number, they began reorganizing themselves later," said Katiuska, author of Todo el tiempo de los cedros, a sensitive record of the Castro Ruz family published in 2003.
Katiuska recalled Celia Sánchez, who collated every little note written in the Sierra Maestra and, after the triumph of the Revolution, organized a small team which traveled into the mountains where the rebels had passed through in order research the terrain and have the memories of the protagonists as their guide. Thanks to that effort, the Council of State’s Office of Historical Affairs was born, and conserved the documents, dispatches broadcast by the Radio Rebelde station, messages from guerrilla leaders and the testimonies of hundreds of individuals.
These documents helped the Comandante en Jefe to meticulously recreate those days of 1958 when the dictatorship’s army launched its offensive against the First Rebel Front and the tenacious defense of this territory by the guerrilla forces in the Sierra Maestra.
Katiuska emotionally summed up what she believes will endure from this editorial endeavor: "Fidel, the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, with his singular seal as a writer/guerrilla, with a lively and fresh literary style – which could be defined as a Hemingway-like simplicity given the perfectionism of the search for the best words, the purity of the language and the profundity and symbolism of the words expressed – is revealing for the future the key factors of the triumph of a few combatants against an entire army, disproportionately armed and equipped."
ON GRAPHIC DESIGNERS’ DAY
By pure chance, the book was launched precisely on the Graphic Designers’ Day, August 2. And this is not just any edition, but one that marks a "before and after" in Cuban printing techniques. Alberto Alvariño Atiénzar, deputy head of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, confirmed: "Because of its size and complexity, La victoria estratégica is the most outstanding undertaken by the country’s publishing and graphic design industries."
It is a sizeable book of 896 pages, machine-stitched, with a cover that combines an ultraviolet veneer, a matt finish, patterns and embossments, "a cutting-edge universal technique in graphic arts that extols the talents of our workers, in particularly at the Federico Engels and Durero Caribe printing press, with the support of the Alejo Carpentier printing press.
A significant number of the specialists and workers in these institutions who worked on the publication of this book, as well as designers and editors, were in the audience at the launch. Elián González and his family were also present.
Alvariño commented that they are currently in the process of the first print run of 10,000 copies, of which 3,500 are almost ready. Work is ongoing on another 50,000 copies so that they become available to the population as soon as possible.
Produced by the Creative Group of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the book design and printing are exquisite. La victoria estratégica boasts a design that is simple, elegant, with wide margins, a legible typography and multiple photos and manuscripts from the time, restored in terms of color for readers’ enjoyment. There are also maps – including a sketch drawn by the Comandante en Jefe at the end of a message to the guerrilla captain, Ramón Paz – plus illustrations of the terrains, reproduced with cartographic and historical rigor, but easily comprehensible for non-experts.
The situations of the military tactics have been brought to life graphically with armaments and location symbols and the closing images are of the weapons employed during the war, many of which were reconstructed using photos of the era.
All in all, it is a jewel.
THE MEMORIES ARE BEING ORGANIZED
Surprised by the beauty of the book and moved by memories. "One feels something special recalling all that," was Fidel’s first comment. Then the correct decision of selecting, rather than a photograph, the map that he drew in the historic days of confronting the Batista army offensive in August 1958: "It’s all there, el Turquino, (the peak), Joaquín, La Jeringa, the little store…," he noted and recalled how much he liked those places, especially the Turquino and Joaquín, "because they were cool and afterward turned cold…"
"For me, it wasn’t too difficult with all the work that they had done over the months," commented Fidel in reference to Katiuska and the team from the Office of Historical Affairs; "They were still dusting off papers, a mountain of papers," and he asked them to bring him a sample of what he was revising prior to this meeting for another book that he is preparing. They brought him a veritable mountain of files which he placed on the table, glanced at them and, while they were returned to their place, commented, looking at Commander of the Revolution Ramiro Valdés who assented with a nod: "The memories are being organized."
He went on to talk about the book’s introduction and autobiography, the parts to which he devoted his greatest efforts in the final stage, but emphasized the collective work that went into locating photos, maps, messages and general data.
Then he moved directly to the book’s contents, on which he worked hard from June 2009. He focused on the importance of the last part of the offensive, broadcast by Radio Rebelde on August 7, 1958, and which is highlighted in Chapter 25: "The final balance of the battle." Katiuska pointed to the page that he was looking for – 701 – and we listened:
It was a resounding victory for our guerrilla forces.
With the retreat of the dictatorship’s last army units from Las Mercedes, the major enemy offensive against the rebel territory of the Sierra Maestra First Front during which the dictatorship’s military command launched its most powerful resources in a final effort to destroy the central nucleus of the guerrilla movement, was crushingly and definitively defeated.
The bravery, tenacity, heroism and capability of the rebel combatants in their determined and organized defense of positions and the overwhelming implementation of all the guerrilla tactical forms of action, destroyed the offensive in 74 days of incessant and intense battling.
Within that brilliant performance of all our combatants, one group of valiant and efficient captains who acted on the frontline of combat with intelligence and courage in leading their men, made a particular contribution to this victorious outcome.
In this final balance it is obligatory to highlight, in first place, Che and Camilo [Cienfuegos], who exactly fulfilled their role as my principal lieutenants at different times, as well as Andrés Cuevas, Ramón Paz, Daniel, Angelito Verdecia, Ramiro Valdés, Guillermo García, Lalo Sardiñas and Pinares, among others.
As I wrote in the dispatch read out by Radio Rebelde on August 7, barely the day after the Battle of
Las Mercedes was concluded:
"The offensive has been liquidated. The greatest military effort in our history as a Republic concluded with the most horrific disaster imaginable on the part of the arrogant dictator, whose troops in full flight after two-and-a-half months of defeat after defeat are signaling the final days of his odious regime. The Sierra Maestra is already totally free of enemy forces."
Fidel stopped reading at that point and remembered a name. He asked for Lieutenant Puertas and was informed that he had died four years ago. His distress was visible, unspoken, but there in the spirit of his words.
During the entire meeting he spoke of combatants by their names and recalled with emotion their bravery, daring and the way in which those modest young men grew in combat to attain the category of heroes. He mentioned Vaquerito (Young Cowboy), nicknamed after the boots and hat that he wore and who rose to be the legendary chief of the Suicide Squad, so decisive in the victory of the Battle of Santa Clara.
THE TRUTH AT ALL TIMES
The humanitarian spirit and vocation for justice of the Cuban Revolution is not a recent fact, but one of its essences. The Rebel Army attended to and treated its prisoners, to such a degree that Fidel thought that many of those soldiers would become part of the new army after the victory, only that, at that time, there was a new and pure mass that had emerged from the people, and who would join the ranks of the new Revolutionary Armed Forces: "Life, in the end, exceeded our predictions and dreams," he affirmed.
Continuing that line of thought, Fidel announced another book that he is working on and which gives continuity to the one just launched given that it narrates "the final strategic counteroffensive of the Rebel Army," for him a tremendous gift because of everything that it covers and recalls.
He referred to the Radio Rebelde dispatches and emphasized that the Rebel Army’s principal weapon was always the truth. He read out one of those dispatches, that of October 17, 1958, written after what he called a tactical setback.
The auditorium was silent from the first paragraphs:
A tactical setback could happen to any unit in a war, because its course does not necessarily have to be an uninterrupted chain of victories against an enemy that has always had the advantage in terms of armaments and military resources but which, however, has born the worst brunt in this battle.
We consider it a duty of our army’s command to inform of any vicissitude that could occur to any of our forces in operations because we understand, as a moral and military principle of our movement, that it is not correct to conceal setbacks from the people or from the combatants.
The setbacks have to be published as well, because useful lessons can be derived from them; so that errors committed by one unit are not committed by others, so that the error that a revolutionary officer could fall into is not repeated by other officers. Because, in war, deficiencies are not overcome by hiding them and deceiving the soldiers, but by circulating them, by always warning all the commands, by demanding new and redoubled care in the planning and execution of movements and actions.
"We only told the truth. If we put in one extra rifle, we were deceiving our own compañeros. Telling the truth was an elemental principle that never failed," Fidel added.
The dispatch details how a rebel column fell into an ambush and was subsequently mercilessly massacred by a sergeant from the Batista dictatorship who thus gained the name of "The Butcher."
"Who trained that army of torturers, who supplied it with weapons, tanks, aircraft, frigates, who taught them to torture and kill prisoners? The empire, the government of the United States, that same government which is now torturing Gerardo Hernández without any justification whatsoever; why, how long is this going to go on?" Fidel asked.
In that way, he closed an analysis that links the history of 50 years ago with the present, in the constant and never-abandoned imperial proposition of subjecting the Cuban nation, without caring about the methods used, however repugnant and cowardly they might be.
Marta Rojas, a journalist and writer, and a witness of the Moncada trial, remembered that 57 years ago, one August 1, she heard Fidel’s voice on a Santiago de Cuba radio station. He had just been captured by Lieutenant Sarría, who took him to the Santiago de Cuba bivouac. Was he thinking of the methodology that he would later take to the underground struggle, to Mexico, to the Granma yacht, to the Sierra? "No," Fidel replied, "I was near enough dead then," referring to the fact that he did not believe that he would survive after being captured.
Historians Francisca López and Rolando Rodríguez asked about the ideology of the leader of the assault on the Moncada Garrison. "I had the privilege of studying; and studying converted me into a Marxist Leninist and a follower of Martí… We were radical Marxist-Leninists and studied Marxism. But, on account of a tactical issue, we didn’t say so. You are not going to take a fortress by hurling yourself at it. You circle around it, you surround it…"
The dialogue ended and an unforgettable line of Rebel Army chiefs and soldiers was waiting for Fidel to sign their copies of the book. We couldn’t hear what he said them, but he was visibly very happy. At times, he laughed with the openness of a child.
Teté Puebla moved out of the line with her book, and tears in her eyes. He caressed her. She had discovered a passage where Fidel mentions her: "The messenger who Che made reference to turned out to be Teté Puebla, an efficient collaborator of Celia [Sánchez], who had an outstanding participation in this episode (referring to the handover of prisoners taken in the El Jigüe battle) and who, later on, became the second in command of the Mariana Grajales women’s battalion."
"I was 16 years old, a young girl. They didn’t want to give me serious tasks," Teté commented to a compañero. "And look at the young girl here… Who would ever have said that I was going to relive my sixteenth year?"
Combatants of the Rebel Army present at the launch of the book La victoria estratégica:
• Commander of the Revolution Ramiro Valdés Menéndez
• Commander of the Revolution Guillermo García Frías
• Army Corps General Abelardo Colomé Ibarra
• Army Corps General Leopoldo Cintras Frías
• Army Corps General Ramón Espinosa Martín
• Army Corps General Joaquín Quinta Solá
• Division General Efigenio Ameijeiras Delgado
• Division General Antonio Enrique Lussón
• Division General Ramón Pardo Guerra
• Division General Romárico Sotomayor
• Brigade General Delsa Esther Puebla
• Brigade General (R) Raúl Castro Mercader
• Brigade General (R) Luis Alfonso Zayas
• Brigade General (R) Reinaldo Mora
• Brigade General (R) Harry Villegas
• Brigade General (R) Rolando Kindelán
• Colonel (R) Orlando Pupo Peña
• Colonel (R) Orestes Guerra
• Colonel (R) José R. Silva Berroa
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