Vol. 76/No. 36      October 8, 2012

Below is an excerpt from Soldier of the Cuban Revolution: From the Cane Fields of Oriente to General of the Revolutionary Armed Forces by Luis Alfonso Zayas, a general in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba. Here Zayas recounts an episode from the 1956-58 revolutionary war led by Fidel Castro. The victory of Castro’s forces against the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista on Jan. 1, 1959, ushered in a mass insurrection in which the toilers of city and countryside wrested political power from the capitalist exploiters and opened the socialist revolution in the Americas.

The book, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for September, is based on interviews conducted by Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press; Martín Koppel and Róger Calero. Copyright © 2011 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY LUIS ALFONSO ZAYAS  
KOPPEL: You were part of Che’s Column 8, weren’t you—the invasion, as it is known, that crossed Cuba from the Sierras?¹

ZAYAS: Yes, we left the Sierra Maestra from a place called Jíbaro on August 31. The march to Las Villas took forty-seven days. Che’s column had one hundred forty men and Camilo’s had around ninety. We marched on foot a little more than six hundred kilometers, in terrible conditions. It was in September and October, hurricane season, and we got hit by two of them—some say three. We marched along the coast the entire time, which meant we had to put up with water, mud, mosquitoes, and little or no food.

We went four days without eating once. We had no fresh food with us at all. We did have rice, beans, and other things.

All this had to be cooked, however, and we couldn’t cook since the army was dug in by the railroad tracks. They would have spotted our fires. So we marched three days without eating.

On the fourth day we got to a wooded area, where there was a peasant who raised pigs. Che bought two of those big pigs. As we were getting ready to cook them at dawn, an enemy aircraft appeared. An informer had reported us, so we had to abandon it all. The last plane circling and strafing us left at around 9:00 p.m. We went back looking for the pigs we’d been preparing, but we couldn’t find them in the dark. We had to go into the lagoon, with water up to our waists, walking more or less like that through the night. The whole next day was really tough. That made four days without food.

Around midnight we came to a small settlement, with a cattle shed. We were given a little guava paste with cheese.

With the fifth day dawning, we finally ate a meal. … We slaughtered a cow and ate it with rice and beans, as well as boiled plantains. That was about 2:30 a.m.

While we were at the dairy farm, we got hit by a second hurricane. It was like an ocean. The water was knee-high everywhere, since Camagüey is flat and we were along the coast. While the hurricane was still passing over, however, we ended up having to get out of there. The reason was that although our presence was supposed to be a secret, a compañero on guard duty had given twenty-five centavos to a young boy to buy honey for him at a grocery store. Meanwhile, Che had sent a contact to buy us food at the same store. While our contact was there, the boy came in.

“Give me twenty-five centavos worth of honey for the rebels over at the dairy farm,” he said.

We had to take immediate measures, since army troops were nearby. The compañero who sent for the honey was put under arrest, and we went on alert. With rain from the hurricane still coming down, we had to move to a wooded area nearby, into knee-deep water—all due to the indiscipline of the person on guard duty. If the army came, Che said, we’d have to shoot the guard. He’s lucky they didn’t come. …

WATERS: When you left Jíbaro, did you think it would take you a month and a half to reach the Escambray?

ZAYAS: The plan was to cover the distance in two days in trucks, to surprise Batista’s army by reaching Las Villas in forty-eight hours. That was the idea.

What happened?

The first hurricane hit before we even got to the trucks, and they got stuck in the rain and mud. So we decided to go on foot. At Camagüey we tried to get a boat but weren’t able to do that either. At one point we did commandeer two trucks, but after only a few kilometers we ran into an ambush at Cuatro Compañeros. We again had to continue on foot. None of the steps we’d taken to get to the Escambray faster worked. It took us forty-seven days.

It was an exhausting march. Men were really completely drained, without food. We lacked supplies of all kinds, including extra clothing and shoes. Our feet were in terrible shape from being constantly wet, and we didn’t even have a change of socks. Some men simply stopped marching. They no longer wanted to continue. They preferred to be killed by the army rather than to continue marching under those conditions—and that’s what happened, the army did kill them.

“If even one person can fulfill the mission,” Che said, “it shows that someone who really wants to do it can.” I knew Che would be one of those. He was determined to carry out the mission Fidel had given him. If we’d advanced by truck, maybe we would have fallen into an ambush and none of us would have made it. If we’d done it in forty-eight hours, perhaps we wouldn’t have weeded out the quitters, those who didn’t have the willpower to continue. Perhaps we would never have been able to measure the capacities of those who did.