“In what?”
“In the possibility of revolution.”
“So much revolution in Cuba,” Quinn said. “If it’s not erupting it’s being planned. It’s like Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution.”
“We are still fighting the wars of ’68 and ’95 that Céspedes and Agramonte and Gómez and Maceo and Martí waged,” said Fidel. “But we have never in our history gotten near Trotsky’s idea of taking the country from the bourgeoisie and putting it into the hands of the workers. We are always fighting another hijo de la gran puta—Spanish villains like Valeriano Weyler, or our own despots, Machado and Batista. And we are always weakened or betrayed by Cubans who fear they’ll lose their wealth if there is a revolution. The cockroaches! Coño! They turned away from Céspedes because he had so many black Mambí leaders that they feared a black takeover. Many Cuban plantation owners would not give up their slaves. They had fought Spain in the past, not for independence but to annex Cuba to the U.S. as a slave state. De pinga!”
“But when the tyrant is impregnable,” Quinn said, “the Cuban revolutionary seems to turn suicidal. Eduardo Chibás shooting himself during his own political radio speech. All those Directorio youths facing down Batista’s machine guns. José Antonio Echevarría walking toward a police car firing his pistol. And Martí charging into battle on horseback as if his leadership skills in bringing an army together were nothing compared with the damage he’d do by galloping into the blasts of Spanish guns. He needed to die. They all needed to die.”
“I would differentiate among them,” said Fidel, “and also between suicide and challenging danger. There is a moment of transcendence, and when it rises up in you, then sudden death can be a mundane fate of no consequence. I am sure José Antonio was in that sort of moment when he walked toward the police car, shooting at it. I see him as totally unafraid to fail.
“With Martí it may have been the opposite — death becoming more important than life. Distance had come between him and the two major military leaders of his war. He had been given the rank of major general, and people were also calling him ‘EI Presidente’ of Cuba Libre. But Máximo Gómez, who made him a general, said that as long as he himself lived, Martí would never be president. And Maceo, a negro general of great intelligence, told Martí to his face that he was not a fighter and not fit to be called a general.
“An unverified but enduring part of this legend is that Maceo pulled the general’s epaulets off Martí’s shoulders. If that was how it was for Martí—and we may never know the truth of this alienation — then his galloping into the Spanish guns very soon afterward can be read as a tactical stroke of recreating himself as a martyr. And revolutions need martyrs. Leaders plan the revolution, but the force grows from the tyrant’s oppression, and then come the argument and the ideas, and when you are in the season of insurrection, the momentum will overcome very great resistance. The leader sometimes realizes how minuscule he is, another energetic figure, but just a small gust of wind moving with the hurricane.”
“The palace attack,” Quinn said, “if it had succeeded would that have started the hurricane?”
“Even if they had killed Batista,” said Fidel, “it would only have been a beginning. Their backup force failed them. They did not have unity. They would have been easily defeated by the army.”
The Comandante’s tone was suddenly abrupt, edgy. He needed Batista alive for his revolution. He took two cigars from his shirt pocket.
“Do you smoke cigars, Señor Quinn?” He offered Quinn one. “A Punch Double Corona, a very old brand owned by a tobacco baron I knew in Havana, an old reactionary who made great cigars. A box of them arrived yesterday, a gift from a Santiago lawyer who supports us. I view it as a gift from the gods, perhaps from Changó, although Changó hates cigars.”
Quinn accepted the cigar and said, “I smoked my first at age eleven and spat for half an hour. In 1945 I was working a Christmas job in the post office and a mailman gave me a Headline, a sweet nickel cigar and I loved it. I graduated to ten-cent White Owls, but I know nothing of serious cigars. I’m ready to learn.”
“Cuba will teach you, and about many other things also,” Fidel said. “It has already taught you about women.”
“I’m not quite sure what I’ve learned,” said Quinn.
“You learned how to take a wife.”
“That was a miracle.”
“Yes, they sometimes happen in Cuba.”
Fidel led Quinn outside and they walked from the hut to the edge of the woods and back with all the men watching them, the interpreter at Quinn’s side speaking into his ear. Fidel lit Quinn’s and his own Double Coronas with a Zippo and Quinn puffed his alive, savored it, and between puffs gestured his approval to the Comandante.
“They are truly great,” said Fidel. “And the smoke also repels mosquitoes.”
“To get back to revolution,” said Quinn. “My grandfather quoted Maceo that you don’t beg for liberty, you win it with the blow of a machete. He was awed by it. Do you know the battle of Jiguaní?”
“I know the machete. Battles were encounters in that war, not designed. Armies came upon each other and fought.”
“That was Jiguaní,” said Quinn. “Gómez had tried to lure the Spaniards out of their barracks, but failed, so he sent troops to burn Jiguaní’s cattle farm and kill the Spanish herd, and sent hundreds of former slaves, convoyeros, to bring back the meat. The unarmed convoyeros were carrying great slabs of beef back toward Gómez when Spanish foot soldiers ambushed them. Gómez heard the firing and moved with his six hundred white-shirted troops — the charge of the whispering machetes — and the Spanish front disintegrated. Mambí horsemen cut off their arms, or split them in half, a great slaughter. The wounded crawled into the woods to hide, but the Mambí soldiers followed. Nicodemo, the slave who had guided my grandfather into Cuba Libre, was shot in the left arm, but with machete in hand listened for moans from the wounded and beheaded eighteen. He piled their heads at the forest’s edge.”
“First,” said Fidel, “I want you to know that we do not execute enemy wounded. At La Plata we treated them with our medicine. And second, if the troops had formed their Spanish square, those charging machetes would have fallen from Spanish volleys. The machete was effective when the war began, for the surprised Spaniards could not match it with their single-shot rifles and bayonets. It was a weapon for close combat, not attack. The machete was still used in ’95, but when Gómez ordered a machete charge in a battle at Cascorro the Spaniards had repeating rifles, Mausers, and they slaughtered the Cubans, dead horses everywhere. That legendary charge of the machete had come to an end.”
Quinn and the Comandante had been sitting elbow-to-elbow on the outcropping, Quinn’s cigar down to a stub. Fidel stood up and two of his men moved closer to him.
“I would like to explain in detail to you,” he said, “just how we are waging our war on Batista’s army, but that would give him the edge. He has three thousand troops in Oriente. We do not have so many. But I can tell you this, that the way into the Sierra Maestra is not easy. Every entrance is like the pass at Thermopylae, where fourteen hundred Greeks held off a hundred thousand Persians for seven days, slaughtering a multitude until a traitor showed the Persians a path where they were able to outflank the Greeks.”