Comandante Che: Guerrilla Soldier, Commander, and Strategist, 1956-1967 / Edition 1

by Paul J. Dosal

Overview

The victory of Fidel Castro’s rebel army in Cuba was due in no small part to the training, strategy, and leadership provided by Ernesto Che Guevara. Despite the deluge of biographies, memoirs, and documentaries that appeared in 1997 on the thirtieth anniversary of Guevara’s death, his military career remains shrouded in mystery. Comandante Che is the first book designed specifically to provide an objective evaluation of Guevara’s record as a guerrilla soldier, commander, and strategist from his first skirmish in Cuba to his defeat in Bolivia eleven years later.

Using new evidence from Guevara’s previously unpublished campaign diaries and declassified CIA documents, Paul Dosal reassesses Guevara’s impact as a guerrilla warrior and theorist, comparing his accomplishments with those of other guerrilla leaders with whom he has been ranked, including Colonel T. E. Lawrence, Mao Tse-Tung, and General Vo Nguyen Giap.

This reassessment reveals that Guevara was often underrated as a conventional military strategist, overrated as a guerrilla commander, and misrepresented as a guerrilla theorist. Guevara achieved his greatest military victory by applying a conventional military strategy in the final stages of the Cuban Revolution, orchestrating the defensive campaign that held off the Cuban army in the summer of 1958. As a guerrilla commander, he scored impressive victories in ambush after ambush in Bolivia, but in winning the battles he lost the war. He violated most of his own precepts during the Bolivian campaign, compelling analysts to question the validity of both his strategies and his command skills.

Though he is credited with developing foco theory, Guevara never attempted to advance a new theory of guerrilla warfare. He was a fighter, not a theorist. He wanted to defeat American imperialism by launching guerrilla campaigns simultaneously in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but his tricontinental strategy resulted in failures first in the Congo and then in Bolivia. Comandante Che presents the full record of Guevara’s successes and failures, separating myth from reality about one of the twentieth century’s most controversial revolutionary figures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780271022628
Publisher:	Penn State University Press
Publication date:	07/15/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

Paul J. Dosal is Professor of History at the University of South Florida.

Read an Excerpt

Comandante Che

Guerrilla Soldier, Commander, and Strategist, 1956-1967

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By Paul J. Dosal

Pennsylvania State University Press

Copyright © 2004 Paul J. Dosal
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0271022620

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Chapter One NOBODY SURRENDERS HERE! Until he arrived at the port of Tuxpan, Mexico, on November 24, 1956, Ernesto Guevara, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor from Argentina, did not know how Fidel Castro, a thirty-year-old revolutionary from Cuba, intended to transport his rebel army across the Caribbean Sea. A week earlier, a Havana newspaper had published Castro's threat to invade Cuba if dictator Fulgencio Batista did not resign immediately. In contrast to putting forth that impudent declaration, Castro divulged few details of his invasion plans to his soldiers. Few rebels knew how, when, or where the invasion would take place. They all learned one sobering truth at Tuxpan. Castro planned to load one hundred soldiers and their supplies on a fifty-eight-foot yacht called the Granma. Built in 1943 and sunk a decade later, the refurbished vessel could safely carry only twenty-five people. When Universo Sanchez, a confidante of Castro, saw it anchored in the Tuxpan River, he asked timidly: "When do we get to the real ship? Where is the mother ship?" On thispleasure craft, Fidel loaded 2 antitank guns, 90 rifles, 3 Thompson submachine guns, and 40 pistols, plus 48 cans of condensed milk, 2,000 oranges, 6 hams, a box of eggs, 100 chocolate bars, and 10 pounds of bread. Boxes filled up the cabin then spilled onto the deck, leaving rebels wondering where they might sit. When all the equipment and supplies had been loaded, eighty-two rebels filled up every remaining space. Castro left behind another fifty men, many of whom probably felt lucky that there had not been enough room for them on the Granma. At 1:30 A.M., one of the vessel's two diesel engines revved up and the yacht began the adventure that would alter Cuban history and make Ernesto Guevara the legendary "Che." Within an hour, the overloaded Granma left the calm waters of the river and entered the turbulent waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Che did not know where they would land and he could not identify his first military objective, but he joined the Cuban patriots in singing the Cuban national anthem. Within five minutes, "the whole boat took on a ridiculously tragic appearance," Che later wrote. Men with whitened faces hurled their last supper into buckets; others lay in anguish until they could hold their churning stomachs no longer. Luckily Che did not get seasick and could tend to the men, but he had no motion sickness pills to prescribe. Then the yacht began to take on water. A handful of seaworthy men began to bail water while the mechanic tried frantically to get the pumps working. Che laughed when one sane sailor turned off an open faucet and stopped the flooding. The stench of failure already hung over the sickened warriors. As the sun rose on the twenty-seventh, the rebels found themselves in calm seas north of the Yucatan Peninsula. Fidel set a course directly eastward, hoping to make up for lost time. He had calculated that the journey from Mexico to Cuba would take five days. Because of rough seas, excessive weight, and one nonfunctioning motor, the Granma had been plugging along at 7.2 knots instead of the 10 knots that Castro had anticipated. The progress of the boat through placid waters lifted spirits and soothed stomachs, but it also resulted in an increasing demand for food, forcing Fidel to ration his scarce supplies. While most of the men recovered, Che fell victim to a severe asthma attack; the doctor had no medication to prescribe for himself either. Che had fought with asthma since he had been two years old, and it got the best of him during the journey. At 5:00 P.M. on November 28, the Granma changed course to the southeast, heading through Yucatan Channel into the Caribbean. (See Map 1.) With the abrupt change in course, it became obvious that Fidel did not intend to invade anywhere near Havana or western Cuba. Castro intended to land the main body of the Movimiento 26 de Julio (26th of July Movement, or M-26-7) in eastern Cuba on November 30, at the same time that M-26-7 militants in Santiago and elsewhere would launch diversionary strikes on selected army garrisons and police stations. Fidel planned to land his rebel army at Playa las Coloradas, about twelve miles south of Niquero on the western coast of Oriente province. Frank Pams, the general coordinator of the M-26-7, planned to draw Batista's army away from Castro's invasion force by attacking the police headquarters, the maritime police office, and the Moncada garrison in Santiago. Pams, who had worked out the details of the general strategy with Fidel in Mexico, hoped to prevent Batista from sending reinforcements to engage Castro. By pinning down Cuban soldiers in Santiago, Holgumn, and Guantanamo, the urban militants expected to facilitate Castro's landing near Niquero, where M-26-7 militants led by Celia Sanchez would reinforce him with arms, ammunition, supplies, and trucks. Castro would then lead his augmented force in attacks on the isolated army base at Niquero and possibly Manzanillo, capturing more arms and ammunition to supply a larger rebel army. From Manzanillo he could proceed to Santiago or into the Sierra Maestra. If Pams took Moncada he could join the M-26-7 forces there; if not, he could lead his men to a more secure location in the Sierra Maestra, from where he would direct a guerrilla campaign against Batista. Given that the strategy required precise coordination between units in two countries, any delays en route could endanger the entire mission. By dawn on November 30, the Granma was still puttering along west of Gran Cayman Island, two days behind schedule. Even worse, the Cuban military had already learned of Castro's departure from Mexico. At 5:45 A.M. on November 30, the Cuban air force initiated an islandwide search for a white sixty-five-foot yacht flying the Mexican flag. Cuban intelligence agents, working in collaboration with American and Mexican agents, had been monitoring Castro's activities in Mexico for at least a year. American, Cuban, or Mexican agents probably detected the Granma's departure soon after it sailed from Tuxpan, if not earlier. Given that Cuban insurrections had always been based in eastern Cuba, Batista expected Castro to invade Oriente province. Beginning on November 5-three weeks before the Granma's departure-the Cuban air force began flying patrols along the north and south coasts of Oriente province. Batista also reinforced army garrisons in Santiago and Holgumn the day after the Granma left Tuxpan. The troop movements that Fidel hoped to deter by launching diversionary strikes had actually been promoted by his public declaration that he intended to invade Cuba. Batista's patrols and troop movements prior to the Santiago uprisings clearly indicated that he intended to meet and defeat Castro's rebel army, wherever it landed. Unaware of Castro's delay, Frank Pams attacked as scheduled. At 7:00 A.M. on November 30, M-26-7 soldiers attacked the police headquarters and the maritime police building in Santiago, while snipers tried to keep the soldiers in the Moncada barracks pinned down. Twenty rebels took the maritime police building, but Pams and his combatants met with stiff resistance at the police headquarters. At 11:00 A.M., Pams realized that the attacks would fail and ordered his men to change back into civilian clothes and filter into the general population. In Guantanamo, a group of rebels gained control of an army outpost, but they abandoned it and took to the hills when they learned of an approaching army patrol. In Holgumn, the M-26-7 hit a few targets, but Havana remained absolutely quiet. Unable to communicate with Pams from the Granma, Castro could not discuss the situation with Pams and modify their strategy accordingly. He could only listen to radio reports about the Santiago uprising and contemplate his own dwindling alternatives, with an engagement with the Cuban army, navy, or air force increasingly likely. The men on the Granma never expected to land wholly undetected, but at the rate they were going, they most likely would be martyrs by the end of 1956. By the evening of November 30, the rebels knew that the plans for a coordinated invasion and national uprising had failed. However, Castro could not change course and "invade" Jamaica, Mexico, or some other country. He could only disembark his rebel army in Cuba. The aborted Santiago uprising had definitely alerted the Cuban army to the pending arrival of Castro. On November 30 Batista suspended constitutional guarantees, declared the entire province of Oriente to be in a state of "Operations," and placed the rest of the country on alarm. Air and naval patrols continued. If Castro managed to elude the patrols and disembark in Oriente, he would now have to contend with an army under orders to search for and capture his rebel forces. On the afternoon of December 1, Fidel finally divulged his military plans to his soldiers. Despite the defeat of the Santiago uprising, Castro announced that he would disembark the rebel army at a point near Niquero, from where, one can deduce, he still intended to attack the Niquero garrison. He could no longer count on receiving reinforcements from Celia Sanchez, because his landing had been delayed. In fact, Celia withdrew her units when the Granma did not land on November 30. Nothing in Fidel's original plan had materialized, yet he refused to abandon his military strategy and disembark at a point with easier and safer access to the Sierra Maestra. A landing near Niquero made sense only if Castro intended to attack Niquero. Ramsn Bonachea and Marta San Martmn, in their study of the Cuban insurrection, contend that Castro applied his contingency plan after he learned of the failure of the Santiago uprising. If he had opted for his contingency plans while en route to Cuba, he should have set a course for the southern coast of Oriente, from where the rebels would have had a relatively short and safe march to the Sierra Maestra. Castro definitely shelved his plans for an attack on Niquero, but he implemented his contingency plan after the Granma landing. He could have saved precious time and lives by landing his men at a site with shorter and safer access into the Sierra Maestra. Castro had evidently selected the farm of Mongo Pirez as his first operational headquarters and a rallying point. Located at Purial de Vicana, just five miles north of the coast, it provided an excellent staging area for a march into the Sierra Maestra. (See Map 2.) Celia Sanchez, leader of the M-26-7 forces in Manzanillo, favored a landing at or near Pilsn, El Macho, or La Magdalena, all of them "ideal landing places" on the southern coast of Oriente province. "At Pilsn, they would have been one step away from the Sierra; it is right on the flank of the mountain. There would have been no problems," Celia later explained. As it happened, a shortage of fuel dictated Castro's decision to attempt a landing at Coloradas beach. The expedition suffered a critical setback around one o'clock in the morning on December 2, when Roberto Roque, the navigator, fell overboard. Fidel could not make landfall without his navigator. The Granma circled around in search of Roque, with only a lantern available to illuminate the dark waters. After an hour, the rebels pulled Roque on board. In recovering Roque, Castro had expended precious supplies of fuel and pushed the scheduled landing perilously close to daybreak. With Roque back at the helm, the Granma finally broke from its easterly course and headed northeast toward Coloradas beach. As the Granma sailed into Niquero channel, Captain Onelio Pino and Roberto Roque realized that their navigational charts were wrong. They did not know where they were. With dawn approaching and the tanks nearly out of fuel, Fidel could not waste any more time. He ordered full speed ahead, directly toward whatever coast lay in front of them. At 4:20 A.M., the Granma slid into the mud one hundred yards offshore, in a mangrove swamp more than a mile south of Coloradas beach. Fidel's long-anticipated invasion of Cuba looked more like a shipwreck than an amphibious assault. Around six o'clock that morning, Captain Josi Smith Comas, a veteran of the Korean War, began to disembark his vanguard platoon. The men lowered the lifeboat and loaded it with their heavy weapons. It sank. Unable to bring the yacht any closer, the men jumped into the water, carrying only their personal weapons overhead. Some men sank hip deep in mud. Captain Juan Almeida's center platoon went into the water next, followed by Castro and his general staff (which included Che), and Captain Razl Castro and his rearguard. As the men watched their boots sink into the mud, their hearts sank with them, as they gradually realized that they had landed in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had disembarked in a thick mangrove swamp, and an impenetrable net of branches, gnarly stumps, and tepid water faced them as far as they could see. By 7:00 A.M. on December 2, Second Lieutenant Aquiles Chinea, commanding Squadron 12 of the Rural Guard in Manzanillo, received a confidential report that two hundred to three hundred well-armed men had landed at Coloradas beach, about sixteen miles south of Niquero. Lieutenant Chinea immediately ordered the commander of the Coast Guard 106 to scout the area. With only eight men under his command, Lieutenant Chinea knew that he could not engage the invaders until he received reinforcements from Bayamo. While he waited for help to arrive, he flew over the landing sight to determine the exact location, size, strength, and direction of the invading force. As the rebels hacked their way through the mangroves, two planes randomly strafed the swamp. The pilots could not penetrate the swamp any easier than could the rebels cursing their way through it. Unable to spot the rebels moving slowly through the thicket below, the pilots strafed the area anyway, having little impact on the tortuous rebel movement through the swamp. It took the rebels more than two hours to cut through a mile of mangroves. Che, afflicted by the high humidity and rising heat, suffered through a vicious asthma attack while he plowed through the suffocating swamp. As soon as he joined the men on solid ground near the thatched-roof hut of Angel Pirez Rosabal, the sound of artillery and machine-gun fire from the swamp from which they had just escaped indicated that the army was in pursuit. Castro ordered the troops to move out. At this point, with enemy planes in pursuit and without Celia Sanchez's reinforcements, a move toward Niquero would expose the troops to unnecessary risks. Castro finally abandoned his conventional strategy and ordered the rebels to march toward the Sierra Maestra.

Continues...

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Table of Contents

CONTENTS

List of Maps

Preface

1. Nobody Surrenders Here!

2. The Making of a Revolutionary

3. The Making of a Guerrilla

4. Comandante Che

5. All Guns to the Sierra

6. The Conquest of Santa Clara

7. Guerrilla Warfare

8. The Tricontinental Strategy

9. The History of a Failure

10. Here I Am Adviser to No One

11. Not Another Vietnam

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

“This is a solid, realistic study of a man, not an icon. As the title suggests, Paul Dosal portrays the complete Che Guevara, but, above all, he is unsurpassed in revealing Che the guerrilla soldier—the grunt, the guy in the mud, facing death and killing ruthlessly.”

—Charles Ameringer,Penn State University

“This outstanding work is the first comprehensive, objective, and truly professional study of the contribution of Che Guevara to the theory and practice of revolutionary guerrilla warfare in the twentieth century. It is based on a thorough and careful reading of the relevant primary sources—principally, Che’s voluminous campaign diaries, along with recently declassified CIA documents on his operations in the Congo and Bolivia.”

—Neill Macaulay,University of Florida

“He [Dosal] does not pretend to deal with Guevara’s personal life or his career as a bureaucrat in Cuba, but despite those deliberate omissions, if one could read only a single book about Guevara, this would not be a bad choice.”

—Henry Butterfield Ryan The Americas

“This is an interesting and clearly-written study of Che the soldier and strategist, intended ‘for both scholars and the general public.’”

—British Bulletin of Publications

“Comandante Che reflects years of richly detailed research; it attempts to address virtually every major controversy over Che’s relationship with Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, the Cuban Communist Party, various Latin American parties and guerrilla movements, and the Soviet and Chinese leaderships whose ideological disputes framed Guevara’s commitment to global armed struggle against the United States, imperialism and capitalism.”

—Brian Loveman HAHR

From the Publisher