Somewhere in there he actually drifted off. But it was a shallow, restless sleep, broken by dreams. In one of these he was back in the water off Tarawa, that moment of the war’s darkest horror, where the Higgins boats had gotten caught on the reef and they had a whole thousand-yard walk in neck-deep water under heavy Jap fire. The tracers were white-blue, like snakes or whips that lashed or struck across the water, and it was so deep and heavy you could hardly move and there were times when the island ahead disappeared behind swells and the ships behind disappeared too, and there you were, one man, neck-deep in water, defenseless—alone, it seemed, on the face of a watery planet.
Gunfire.
Then he realized the gunfire wasn’t in his brain.
He snapped awake and listened as the shots rang through the night.
He got up, raced to the westward-facing window and opened the curtain, pushed the shutters open wide.
Facing the square, he saw nothing but the flicker of gas lamps in the park, but he knew the gunfire came from behind, to the east.
Frenchy called three minutes later.
“It’s happening. The idiot attacked the Moncada Barracks. There’s a gunfight going on there now. We can get him. How soon can you be set?”
“I’m ready now,” said Earl. He hung up the phone, picked up the rifle case and headed downstairs.
Chapter 39
The mulatto Cartaya stood before them all and once again sang his song, a catchy tune that bore an embarrassing similarity to a famous English seaside rhythm.
Marching towards an idea
Knowing very well we are going to win
More than peace and prosperity
We will fight for liberty.
Onwards Cubans!
Let Cuba give you a prize for heroism.
For we are soldiers
Going to free the country.
Cleansing with fire
Which will destroy this infernal plaque
Of bad governments
And insatiable tyrants
Who have plunged Cuba
into evil.
On and on it went, through several more verses, and by the end, most of the men were weeping. They felt it so profoundly. It stirred them, deep in their Cuban souls.
They were not radical students or intellectuals, members of any elite or vanguard. They were just men. Most were factory workers, agricultural workers, shop assistants. There was a watchmaker, a teacher, a taxi-driver, a doctor, a dentist, a bookshop assistant, a chimney sweep, three carpenters, a butcher, an oyster seller and a nurse.
They came not because of him, but because of it. It was Cuba. They felt it. He was only the instrument of will. He made it happen by conceptualizing it, by focusing on plans much discussed but always lacking behind them the necessary force, and by supplying that force. What he stood for, they didn’t know; what his programs were, they didn’t care. He may not have stood for anything. He was just the one who had appointed himself the leader, and by reputation he gathered them. They didn’t even know him, they didn’t care about him; he was just the man who’d made it happen over the past month.
Having talked this over a thousand nights in coffeehouses and over chessboards and cigars and after rallies, he knew who to call. He had begun to make phone calls—thank you, Mr. President, for the wonderful Cuban phone system, the best in the Caribbean—from the town of Artemisa, ten miles east of Santiago, on the plain that separated the mountains from the seas, as was this farmhouse where they were now meeting. He made phone calls to men he knew and trusted, who in turn made phone calls to men they knew and trusted, who then…and so forth and so on, and now there were eighty or so of them, gathered here in their shabby khaki uniforms, with their shabby weapons, a few American M1s or carbines, a Winchester .44 lever rifle, but mostly .22 hunting rifles or old double-barreled shotguns used for doves. They followed him because there was no one else to follow. They followed him because whatever was said of him, this much was true: he had a big set of balls.
“Companions,” he said, “fellow crusaders. Tonight is the night of nights. Perhaps we die, perhaps we triumph. But we will not pass without having made the ultimate attempt. Companions, brothers, long live freedom! Long live Cuba!”
He was best at moments like that. Perhaps his true gift was the ability to put into simple, rugged language those things they all felt, and by doing that, become the vessel of their emotions.
They raised their rifles and cheered by the light of campfires in the barnyard, and then there was nothing left to say. They went to their cars, twenty-six in all, rickety old vehicles, some barely drivable, and climbed in three or four to each one, and off they went.
He was in the second car. He drove. Nobody talked, though some men smoked. The convoy, obeying rules of traffic, not politics, accordioned this way and that, expanding and contracting as it went over the dusty roads, found the slope, passed through the outskirts of Cuba’s second largest city, rotated around the traffic circle, and headed down the Victoriano Garzon for Avenue Moncada and the future, whatever it might bring.
He worried that the man ahead would lose his way. He worried that the cars would lose contact with each other and wander, the whole unit breaking down into nothingness. He worried that he would be a coward. He worried that nothing would go as planned, that he would be captured and the legendary Ojos Bellos, whom all knew of and all feared, might cut his eyes out and make him sing a song of defeat and surrender and betrayal. He worried that he would die a forgotten nobody, and all his dreams and all his convictions of destiny and change and power would disappear for naught.
They drove through streets sleepy but not as sleepy as he had imagined. He thought that by now everybody would be drunk or in bed with a new partner. Yet it was still surprisingly crowded. Now and then a soul would notice this strange parade of beat-up old vehicles rumbling through the streets and watch, wide-mouthed, wondering at meanings. Still, no alarm was given, no commotion created. If the assemblage confirmed certain rumors, the cars outraced them to their destination.
They rolled onward into the night.
In the way that time collapses when that which is anticipated and seems forever away is suddenly upon you, they turned right off of the central thoroughfare of Victoriano Garzon and down the Avenue Moncada, passing the military hospital on the left, then a number of small wooden officers’ houses, buried in trees, and finally, at the intersection, arrived at Checkpoint 3, access to the barracks. The building itself loomed ahead at the oblique, the castellated ramparts visible in the night, so that it looked like something the great Don Quixote himself would charge, lance ready, heart athrob. Its yellow-and-white color scheme stood out in lighting from the porch that ran along its front. A low wall surrounded it, a parade ground lay to one side of it, and only a gate-house marked it off from the rest of the world. It housed a thousand men, but tonight, or so the plan assumed, they would all be drunk.
The plan was simple, and at least it was a plan. The first car sped ahead, opening a distance between itself and the rest of the column. As it went, Castro prayed to God in his heaven that the advantage of surprise—his only advantage—was to be protected.
He slowed to a creep, the speed of a man walking, as ahead, the first car reached the checkpoint, and six men leapt out in the best of the uniforms.
“Make way for the general!” shouted Guitart, their leader, “open the gate for the general.”
It worked, almost magically. The three guards snapped into a present-arms in honor of the general and as they froze, their old rifles locked in place vertically against their chests, they were overcome and disarmed. Guitart and his party shoved them ahead and went inside to open the gate.
And then, just as magically, it fell apart. Castro saw chaos and disaster emerge in the form of three men, two soldiers with American submachine guns and a sergeant with a pistol at his belt. They shouldn’t have been there, but they were, and so it goes in the affairs of men and revolutions. They were evident
ly on some sort of perimeter patrol, and stopped abruptly and just stared at what they could see and no one else could: a line of twenty-five cars creeping along, lights out, jammed with men.
He had no choice but an act of sudden, stunning violence. He had no hesitation. He veered savagely, running up onto the pavement, bouncing over the curb, turning on his headlights and pinning the three in the glare. They panicked, but it was too late, and he rammed into them, knocking them asunder, felt the ragged jolt as the car crushed against them. Weapons flew, bodies flew.
But not the sergeant. He alone was quick enough or sober enough to react, and rolled to the right, just a hair, and the charging vehicle did not hit him.
Castro leapt out; the sergeant had to be stopped.
But he was gone, except for the sounds of his pistol, which he had drawn as he fled, firing off seven rounds as fast as he could and screaming “Assalto! Assalto!”
He was the hero, not Castro, for in that moment the entire complexion of the event changed.
Castro, out of the car, saw that he was too late, but still thought that if the column moved quickly it could penetrate the barracks, bring fire on the soldiers, overwhelm them with fear, cajole them into dropping their arms, and therefore take over the city.
But he turned now and saw chaos. When he leapt from his car, that was the signal—he had forgotten. All the other cars halted, and the men now poured from them, rifles and shotguns at the ready, hungry for the battle that now seemed destined not to occur in the barracks itself, but here on the Avenue Moncada at a kind of forty-five-degree angle to the barracks.
“The cars!” he screamed. “You must get back into the cars!”
It began slowly. A shot spanged off the hood of a car, and then another, and then another. The noise was almost more terrifying than the prospect of death, for when the bullets fired, their noise filled the air and beat against the eardrums, and in the next second, they smacked into automobile metal with a vibratory clang.
Castro saw that now was the only moment he would have.
“Attack!” he cried. “Open fire! Kill the bastards.”
With that he ran to the front of his own wrecked vehicle, seized a machine pistol from the ground where one of the two now moaning soldiers had tossed it in the moment of his ugly smashing, turned and pointed it at the windows and doors looming ahead to the left, and unleashed a roar as he emptied the magazine in one shuddering, lurching burst.
A few men raced past him, rushed through the checkpoint, and began to move in on the barracks. But a blast of fire from the windows drove them back or pinned them down.
All along the line, the rebels retreated to their vehicles and fired, their .22 and shotgun blasts filling the air. The whole side of the corner of Moncada seemed to dance as the rebel rounds tore against it, blowing out windows, pulverizing the facade. And then, as if a storm had spent itself, the men stopped shooting, all reaching the end of their magazines in the same second.
The soldiers by this time were fully awakened. An officer inside must have realized what was happening and rallied them. By whatever presence, at each window and doorway it seemed three men appeared, each with a rifle, and each shooting as fast as he could.
Now it was a torrent of fire from the building, and it was the cars that shuddered when hit by the fusillade. Windows smeared, then shattered, tires flattened, shocks gave up. The cars, like dying animals, settled brokenly toward the pavement, screams arose from the hit, a man or two fell limp and dead.
Castro struggled with the machine gun, got another magazine from the soldier’s belt into it, and again sprayed the building. He watched his bullets dance along, and for a moment was buoyed by the power he unleashed, having in his mind a recent event where the power of the guns was directed only at him.
But then the soldiers above opened fire, and he dropped in a blizzard of detonations, as rifle rounds from a hundred weapons sought him out.
“What do we do?” someone asked.
“We must be strong! We must be brave. We must hold. Guitart is inside. He will attack them from the rear.”
But at that moment a squad of soldiers broke from the barracks, headed across the street and began to work their way along the wall, where they had another angle from which to fire at the gaggle of revolutionaries. Shots began to bang this way and that off the cars. From somewhere farther out in the parade ground, a machine gun post jumped to life. A fusillade of bullets chopped into the ground and the cars, bringing up clouds of dust where it struck.
They fired tracers, and the flickering of the illuminated rounds filled the street with light. Then, a car exploded, its tank punctured by one of the burning bullets. A plume of feathery flame rose, tumbling, revealing the carnage.
The parade of wrecked vehicles lay in the street, all tattered from gunfire. Among them, the rebels cowered, rising now and again for a shot with the little .22 rifles, which sounded like twigs breaking against the shovel-poundings of the heavier battle weapons inside.
Feeling insanely untouchable, Castro walked along the line, screaming imprecations at his men.
“Fire on them! Mow them down! Give them a taste of lead! Show them no mercy!”
But his screams seemed to have no effect on the crouching men.
Finally, one looked over at him from the shelter of the car he cowered behind.
“It’s finished. We are running out of ammunition. There are too many of them.”
“No,” he said, “you must stay and fight till the end. Cuba demands it.”
“Cuba doesn’t demand my death,” said the man.
“Guitart and his men are inside. They will bring fire on them from behind and we will move into the courtyard. Have faith, my broth—”
“Guitart is dead. I saw him shot down.”
“No, my brother, he—”
“We are doomed!” screamed the man. “Order a retreat! We have failed.”
Castro looked up and down the line; some men returned fire, but for each shot a rebel fired, a storm of rifle and machine gun bullets answered. Two cars burned. Guitart and his people were dead. Across the street, he could see soldiers creeping among the line of officers’ houses, moving closer under fire-and-advance maneuvers. It meant that he would soon be under direct fire from three sides. And behind the soldiers would be the torturers.
“Fall back!” he screamed. “Retreat and regroup for another night, my brothers. I will cover you.”
He watched them melt into the night, those that could. They scampered off, drawing fire. Some fell and died. Some fell and crawled. Some made it and disappeared into the houses down the road.
At last he was quite alone except for the wounded and the dead, in the flickering of the firelight. Most of the shooting from the barracks had stopped and he saw why. Soldiers on either end of the column of wrecked cars slithered along, dipping in and dipping out. A grenade went into a car and detonated with a flash. A soldier bayoneted a man on the ground, dead or not.
He fired at them with the submachine gun, driving them back, but then he was out of ammunition.
He tossed the gun away and picked up the other one.
“You will not take me alive, you bastards!” he screamed. “You are the milk of pigs, and you defile Cuba.”
He stood up, fired quickly, still driving them back, but then that gun too, was out of ammunition.
“Are you quite done?” someone said.
He turned.
“You!”
A man stood in the ragged linens of a peasant, under a straw hat pulled low. But it was the Russian.
“Yes, me, you idiot.”
“How did you get here?”
“What a ridiculous question. Not as ridiculous as this travesty, but still ridiculous. The question is: how am I going to get you out of here.”
“They are—”
“Not yet. Not quite yet.”
He smiled. He pulled two amazements from the pockets of his baggy trousers. Grenades.
“Best
drop under cover, you brainless young idiot. Do I have to tell you everything?”
Castro knelt between two cars, and the Russian quickly pulled the pin from each grenade and tossed them into the Avenue Moncada. The two blasts occurred simultaneously.
And with that they were off, dashing between two houses, cutting down an alley, then down another one. Soldiers followed, but they dipped down another alley. Ahead, Castro could see an old farmer’s truck pulled by the side of the road, its engine idling.
“What is—”
“Never mind. Your luck hasn’t quite run out, but it will if you delay.”
They ran to it, climbed in, and pulled themselves under a tarpaulin, where Castro discovered to his horror the truck’s cargo was manure.
“Oh, Christ!” he said.
“If you are too pretty for shit, my friend,” said the Russian, “then you are too pretty for revolution.”
He smiled, banged on the back of the cab, and with a lurch the ancient vehicle took off.
The Russian looked over.
“I think we’ve made it, for now. The glorious socialist future awaits your next brilliant decision.”
Chapter 40
First the long passage of shot-up, burned-out automobiles. Already children scampered upon them in the wash of morning light, while crowds fought to get closer to look at the ruination, but were held back by soldiers. The signs of battle were everywhere, in the pools of blood that lay coagulating on the Avenue Moncada, in the smell of burned powder and gasoline and raw, ripped metal, in the debris upon the street. A few small fires still burned, so the smoke was in the air too, and the odor of the blood. Ahead, where the corner of the barracks loomed yellow and white in the sunlight, the ratholes of gunfire riddled the pretend medievalism of the structure. Most of the windows were shot out.