BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS AND MARY-ALICE WATERS
Secretos de Generales (Secrets of Generals), by Luis Báez; Si-Mar Publishing, 1996; Havana, Cuba; 546 pp.; in Spanish.

HAVANA, Cuba - "Where did you serve on your first mission as an internationalist?" Cuban journalist Luis Báez asks Ulises Rosales del Toro, division general of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) and chief of staff of the FAR.

"In October 1963, in Algeria, as chief of staff of the Tactical Combat Group during the war Morocco launched at the border with the goal of forcibly annexing sections of Algerian territory," the Cuban general says.

The Algerians had recently gained their independence from France, Rosales del Toro continues. "They had just begun to govern the country, and their armed forces had not been fully established. For these reasons they were at a disadvantage in confronting Morocco, which enjoyed the support of the great powers. Faced with this situation, Algerian president [Ahmed] Ben Bella asked for Cuba's help."

"What do you draw from your experiences?" asks Báez.

"It was my first trip abroad and my initial contact with the revolutionary movement in another country," says Rosales. He was 21 years old then.

"At the time, Algeria was a school for African revolutionaries. You could see African combatants there preparing to go and fight for national independence in their countries... In addition, I got to know the poverty and the social difficulties facing the Algerian people, who, just like us, had begun the process of building a new society.

"I also saw our FAR operate as a combat unit, engaging in action, maintaining a high level of cohesiveness and readiness to fight far away from our country. It was an unforgettable experience.

"I stayed in Algeria until May 1964," Rosales says. "Our unit did not engage in combat. But our determination to do so and our presence in the middle of a war zone was of great importance to me."

The interview with Rosales concludes the book Secret of Generals, published here in Cuba earlier this year.

Forty-one stories
The book comprises 41 interviews with the top military officers of Cuba's armed forces. Báez is a veteran journalist for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina.

As Raúl Castro, minister of the FAR, says in his preface, Secrets of Generals "is not a textbook on the past, but living history. It is an opportunity to share 41 stories of the Cuban epic in the second half of this century." The book, he says, will contribute to passing on "to new generations the treasure of moral values and accumulated combat experience."

These stories are told by 26 brigadier generals, 13 division generals, one army corps general, and one vice admiral of the navy. The officers explain who they are and how they joined the revolutionary movement. They talk about their experiences around the world as they fought alongside national liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Many, like Rosales, come from peasant families, or working-class backgrounds. Some learned to read and write only after the triumph of the revolution.

Like Rosales, most took part in the revolutionary war in the Sierra Maestra mountains of eastern Cuba. That war, launched in December 1956 by the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army under the leadership of Fidel Castro, toppled the U.S.- backed tyranny of Fulgencio Batista on New Year's Day in 1959.

Thirty-three of the officers interviewed fought with the Rebel Army, and five joined the FAR after the triumph of the revolution. The remaining three had been officers in the Cuban army who opposed the Batista dictatorship and participated in attempts to organize coups against it.

The FAR was forged out of the men and women who fought in the Sierra Maestra.

Book attracts attention
Secrets of Generals has generated considerable interest in Cuba. The small first printing immediately sold out. In recent weeks Granma, the main Cuban daily, the weekly Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth), and other Cuban newspapers have run several of the interviews published in Secrets. The Cuban weekly Granma International ran a review of the book in its March 26 issue. At the end of last year, Cuban television broadcast a 17-part series of documentaries on episodes from the revolution's history, based on narrations by many of the same generals Báez interviewed.

The book has also caught the attention of some media in the United States, especially the Spanish-language press. The Miami Herald and its sister publication in Spanish, El Nuevo Herald, ran reviews of the book in March as did the Los Angeles-based Spanish-language daily La Opinión. These articles zero in on the comments by the Cuban generals regarding the internationalist missions in which they participated.

Moncada and Bayamo
Brigadier general Calíxto García, 66 years old today, participated in the July 26, 1953, attack on the Bayamo garrison - one of the very first battles against the Batista dictatorship. The assault was carried out simultaneously with the attack on the nearby Moncada barracks, the main army garrison in Santiago de Cuba, by revolutionaries under the command of Fidel Castro. The 160 combatants did not succeed in taking either garrison and over 50 were captured and murdered. Another 28 were tried, convicted and imprisoned; they were pardoned in 1955 in response to a massive amnesty campaign.

But the assault on Moncada launched the insurrection against Batista. Out of that action and the subsequent political campaign to free the imprisoned combatants the July 26 Movement was born.

García escaped arrest in Bayamo and managed to get out of the country. He spent almost a year in Costa Rica and Honduras before making his way to Mexico, where he was later reunited with Fidel Castro and other revolutionaries.

While in San José, Costa Rica, he says, "I became friends with Che Guevara, whom I used to see at the Soda Palace, a cafe at the center of the city where many exiles used to meet at all hours of the night... I think I was the first to talk to Che about Fidel, Cuba, and our July 26 Movement."

Ernesto Che Guevara, Argentinean by birth, joined the Cuban rebels in Mexico and became one of the central leaders of the Cuban revolution.

García took part in the landing of the Granma, the yacht that transported Castro, Guevara, and the other fighters from Mexico to eastern Cuba, where they began the revolutionary war in the Sierra Maestra in late 1956. By the end of the war, García was a commander of the Rebel Army. He later served as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1965 to 1980. He is now retired from the FAR.

Prison rebellion
One of the most interesting accounts in the book is the story of the prison break-out that coincided with the Granma landing. It is told by Raúl Menéndez Tomassevich, known as Tomás, who is today a division general.

While a teenager, Tomás worked as a messenger in Rubio, a factory that produced rope-soled shoes in Santiago de Cuba. In 1952 he was imprisoned for "a common crime," as he puts it, "for counterfeiting official documents. I falsified the signature of the mayor of Santiago de Cuba, Felipe Fernández Castillo, in order to withdraw a bunch of pesos from his bank account."

In the Boniato prison, Tomás solidarized with a hunger strike by the revolutionaries who had carried out the assault on Moncada, many of whom were jailed in that same penitentiary for a while. As a result of that action, he was locked in solitary confinement for 50 days. In jail, Tomás met and talked with leaders of the July 26 Movement, becoming a firm supporter. After four years of imprisonment, he organized a prison break-out that was coordinated with strikes and demonstrations called by the July 26 Movement to coincide with the Granma landing.

Tomás, two other prisoners convicted of common crimes, and four leaders of the July 26 Movement escaped "at seven o'clock in the morning, after disarming various policemen, soldiers, and prison officials." The break-out, he says, was authorized by July 26 Movement leader Frank País and was carried out on Nov. 30, 1956. "That same day the actions in Santiago to support Fidel's landing took place as well."

Tomás then became an active member of the clandestine movement against Batista in Santiago. One of his tasks was working in an underground facility making grenades. He later joined the rebels in the Sierra Maestra, rising to the rank of Rebel Army commander. In 1961 and 1962, he served as chief of operations against the bandits in the Escambray mountains, organized by the CIA, who carried out a guerrilla campaign against the revolution. Later he took part in training the combatants who went with Guevara to Bolivia. In 1966 and 1967, Tomás took part in internationalist missions in the Portuguese African colony of Guinea Bissau and in Venezuela, and subsequently in Angola.

The story of the Boniato jail break-out is described in greater detail by Menéndez in the book Prison Rebellion, written together with José Gárciga Blanco, a lieutenant colonel of the FAR. A launching of this book, just published by Editora Política, was held in Havana April 25.

In another account in Secrets of Generals, Delsa Esther Puebla Viltre describes how young women took leadership responsibility and acquired combat experience in the Sierra Maestra, overcoming strong initial objections by several commanders. Puebla, now a brigadier general of the FAR, was the first woman to rise to this rank in Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces.

First major defeat of U.S. empire
The revolutionary struggle against Batista reverberated within the dictator's army, and a number of officers were involved in various military coup conspiracies. A few were won to the side of the revolution and played important roles in building the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

Enrique Carreras Rolas, now division general of the FAR, had been an officer in Batista's air force. After agreeing to participate in a military plot against the regime in mid- 1957, he was jailed by the dictatorship and remained in prison until the triumph of the revolution. In early 1959, Carreras was named head of the revolutionary air force, which at that point had only a handful of fighter planes and only three pilots with any combat experience. He began training classes for new pilots, held at the military base of San Antonio de los Baños, in Havana province. Washington had built the base in the 1940s in order to refuel its planes flying to and from South America, Carreras says.

"I can tell you, without fear of contradiction, that the revolutionary combat air force was born and created at that air base in San Antonio de los Baños," he notes.

Carreras, like most generals interviewed in the book, is a veteran of the Playa Girón battle in 1961, usually called the Bay of Pigs in the United States. That's when the popular militias and the Revolutionary Armed Forces inflicted a crushing defeat on the U.S.-organized mercenaries who invaded Cuba in a failed attempt to overthrow the workers and peasants regime. In a recent speech on the 36th anniversary of this historic battle, Raúl Castro described its outcome as "the first great military defeat inflicted on the United States on this continent."

During the mercenary invasion, Carreras notes, "the enemy forces had approximately a 5-1 advantage on planes and a 12-1 advantage on pilots."

The small, ill-equipped, and newly trained Cuban air force played a central role in the defeat of the counterrevolutionaries. "In less than 72 hours, 10 pilots with eight dilapidated planes flew 70 missions," Carreras explains. Between April 17 and April 19, 1961, Carreras and the other Cuban pilots downed nine B-26 bombers. "We also sank two army transport ships, three LCT boats carrying tanks, and five landing boats." In bringing down the enemy planes, the Cubans killed 14 counterrevolutionaries, including four U.S. instructors.

Later, Carreras headed a Cuban air force mission to Vietnam during Washington's war against the Vietnamese people that also ended with the defeat of U.S. imperialism in 1975.

How tanquistas were trained
Division general Néstor López Cuba completed a training course on operating tanks at the Managua military camp near Havana in 1959 and stayed on at the school as an instructor.

In face of mounting military threats and economic pressure from Washington, the new Cuban government began receiving aid from abroad, López Cuba explains in the book. "In October 1960 Soviet technical aid began arriving," he tells Báez. "They said it came from Czechoslovakia, but the T-34's and SAU-100's were Russian tanks.

"Commander Guillermo García asked me to select the best graduates of the two courses on American tanks we had just completed and organize classes on operating the Soviet tanks. I picked 22 graduates... It was a very intense period of training. Everything we learned in the morning from the Soviet instructors we had to teach at night to the rest of the compañeros using whatever tools we had at our disposal...

"In February [1961] we carried out combat practice in Guaníto, Pinar del Rio. With that exercise we finished the first course on Soviet tanks."

The newly trained tanquistas, led by López Cuba and other officers of the FAR, were essential in crushing the mercenary invaders at Playa Girón.

Another officer who describes the events leading up to and during the Bay of Pigs invasion is brigadier general José Ramón Fernández Alvarez, today vice president of Cuba's Council of Ministers.

Fernández was part of a revolt by officers in Batista's army, called Los Puros (the pure ones), on April 4, 1956, for which he was imprisoned. "Among the officers in that group, I was the most radical," Fernández says. "I thought we had to arrest Batista and execute him for his responsibility in the killings of thousands of people. I had proposed that we needed to carry out an agrarian reform, purge the armed forces, implement the 1940 constitution, and confiscate the goods stolen by public officials. That's as far as I got at the time."

The big majority of inmates incarcerated with Fernández at the infamous Isle of Pines prison were members of the July 26 Movement, and they had a big impact on him. Fernández joined the revolutionary movement after Batista was toppled and was chief of military operations at the Bay of Pigs battle.

Fernández says he went to Playa Girón with great enthusiasm. Even though he had rebelled against Batista, he tells Báez, "I hadn't had the opportunity - as the compañeros who fought in the Sierra [mountains] and the llano [plains] did - to put my life in danger to demonstrate the justice of the ideas we believed in.

"Girón meant for me putting my own body on the line in defense of the revolution and socialism."

Internationalist missions
Army Corps General Abelardo Colomé Ibarra, known as "Furry," participated in the clandestine struggle against the Batista dictatorship in Santiago de Cuba and joined the Rebel Army in 1957 at age 17. Like many others, he comes from a working-class family. His mother was a worker in a biscuit factory and his father was a cook. Today he is a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Cuba and minister of the interior.

In 1962, Colomé left Cuba for an internationalist mission in Argentina and Bolivia that lasted two years. The goal of the expedition was "to prepare the conditions for a guerrilla uprising in Argentina that would be headed by journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti, who had developed strong ties with his compatriot Ernesto Che Guevara," Colomé says.

"At the time I was 22 years old. Considering my age, I was given tremendous responsibility. I had to travel in the area several times to study and prepare the terrain."

Masetti had gone to Cuba's Sierra Maestra in January 1958 and joined the revolutionary movement there. After the triumph, he became founding director of Prensa Latina, the press service launched by the new revolutionary government in Havana.

Masetti was killed in 1964 while leading the guerrilla nucleus he helped launch in the Salta mountains of northern Argentina. After Masetti's death, Colomé returned to Cuba. Eleven years later, he went to Angola as chief of the Cuban military mission there.

In another interview, brigadier general Harry Villegas Tamayo, also known by his nom de guerre Pombo, talks about what he calls the most important period of his life: the ten years he fought alongside Che Guevara - from the Sierra Maestra to the internationalist missions in the Congo and Bolivia.

Villegas went to the Congo (now Zaire) in 1965. "We stayed on Congolese territory for several months," Villegas says, "but because of the position taken by the Organization of African States - that aid could only be provided to the movements fighting against colonialism - we had to leave.

"Che insisted that the request to withdraw our forces be put in writing, so that history could record with absolute clarity Cuba's position in giving internationalist aid to the Congolese people."

In Bolivia, Guevara headed a guerrilla front that set out to build a revolutionary movement of workers and peasants capable of taking power and leading toward socialist revolutions in South America. Che was captured on Oct. 8, 1967, and killed in cold blood the next day by Bolivian army officers after consultation with Washington.

After Che's death, Pombo commanded the six combatants who fought their way out of the encirclement by the U.S.-aided Bolivian armed forces. He tells the story of the Bolivia campaign in detail in the book Pombo: A Man of Che's Guerrilla, the English-language edition of which will be released next month by Pathfinder Press.

Many of the generals describe internationalist missions about which little or nothing has been said in writing before.

In Syria and Nicaragua
Néstor López Cuba, for example, describes the mission Cuban internationalists were part of in Syria between 1973 and 1975. In October 1973 the Syrian and Egyptian governments fought a brief war against Israel in an effort to retake sovereign territory occupied by Tel Aviv in 1967 as part of the Zionist regime's decades-long effort to bolster its dispossession of the Palestinian people.

In Syria General López Cuba headed a tank battalion that later grew to a regiment. While the Cubans did not participate directly in combat to take back the Golan Heights, he says, "We maintained a unit in the front for a year. It was a tank squadron. There was some exchange of artillery fire. They damaged two of our tanks. We lived in a hole, in a chabola, in conditions of a military campaign. In February 1975 we returned to Cuba. They had promoted me to commander." Ten months later he left for Angola.

López Cuba was also chief of the Cuban military mission in Nicaragua. "It was the most complex, difficult, dangerous, and risky task I ever had," he says.

After the July 1979 revolution in that country that overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, Washington organized and financed a counterrevolutionary army, known as the contras, which fought against the government of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. The contras were defeated militarily by 1987.

"It was an irregular war, you never knew precisely where the enemy was," López Cuba says. "We had centers of instruction spread throughout the war zone, and our policy was to visit and support these people constantly.

"We traveled in three or four vehicles through routes where we faced ambushes, mine fields. Sometimes we flew in helicopters at low altitudes, just above the tree tops, or between enormous mountains in a little AN-2 plane. On one occasion they hit one of our escort helicopters. We played with our lives every day."

Advising the Nicaraguan army, "was another complex task with great political content," López Cuba tells Báez. "It's much easier to fight than advise."

The Cubans themselves had gone "through the experience of the Soviet advisors. We couldn't impose our criteria. We had to be very careful and consistent... I can say with no doubt that, during the three years and three months I spent in Nicaragua, I carried out the most politically complex mission, and militarily the most difficult and risky task, I ever had."

Many of the generals talk about their experiences in Angola.

"In Angola we gave substantial support to the struggle against apartheid and the battle for the liberation of Namibia," says Ulises del Toro. "The blood spilled shaped forever the identification of the Cuban revolution with the African peoples, an unblemished feat that will one day be recorded in history for what it was."

Hundreds of thousands of Cubans served on internationalist missions in that country from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s. Cuban volunteer troops helped defeat successive invasions of Angola by South Africa's apartheid regime, which joined with U.S.-organized counterrevolutionary efforts to block the Angolan people from realizing their hard- fought independence from Portugal.

The apartheid army was dealt a decisive military defeat at Cuito Cuanavale in March 1988 by the combined forces of the Cuban volunteers, the Angolan army, and fighters from SWAPO (South West Africa People's Organisation).

The victory at Cuito Cuanavale paved the way for the independence of neighboring Namibia. By puncturing once and for all the myth of the white supremacists' invincibility, it gave another impulse to the battle to bring down the apartheid regime itself, which the South African people succeeded in doing half a decade later.

An `uncontrollable' army
Division general Leopoldo Cintra Frias spent a total of nine years in Angola between 1975 and 1989. Asked about the preparedness of the South African army, he responds, "There are three uncontrollable armies: the South Africans, the Israelis, and the Cubans. The three have different ideologies. The Soviets were never able to control us, even though they tried to on more than one occasion."

"The war in Angola strengthened us politically and ideologically," Cintra Frias says. "It has proved decisive for what we have been able to accomplish during the special period."

Special period is the term Cubans use to describe the extremely difficult economic conditions they have faced since aid and favorable trade relations with the Soviet bloc countries ended abruptly at the beginning of the 1990s and the U.S. economic embargo has been tightened.

"Three hundred thousand Cubans passed through those lands [Angola]. The experience revitalized us, just like in 1959."  
 
 
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