Autobiography of Fidel
● We are publishing the autobiographical essay that begins the book La Victoria Estratégica, written by Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro and which was launched on August 2 in the presence of a number of his guerrilla compañeros

In spite of my origins, from when I graduated I had a Marxist-Leninist concept of our society and a profound conviction of justice

INTRODUCTION

I had doubts over the title of this narration, I didn’t know whether to call it ‘Batista’s Last Offensive’ or ‘How 300 defeated 10,000,’" which sounded like a story from The Thousand and One Nights. For that reason, I felt obliged to include a small autobiography of the first stage of my life, without which its meaning could not be understood. I didn’t want to wait for the publication some day of the responses to numerous questions asked me about my childhood, adolescence and youth, stages which converted me into a revolutionary and armed combatant.

I was born on August 13, 1926. The assault on Santiago de Cuba’s Moncada Garrison on July 26, 1953, came three years after I graduated from the University of Havana. It was our first military confrontation with the Cuban Army, in the service of the dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista.

That armed institution in Cuba, created by the United States after its intervention in the island during the 2nd War of Independence initiated by Jose Marti in 1895, was an instrument of U.S. companies and the Cuban haute bourgeoisie.

The great economic crisis unleashed in the United States in the early 1930s implied high levels of sacrifice for our country, made totally dependent by the trade agreements imposed by that power on the products of its developed industry and agriculture. The purchasing power of sugar had been reduced to almost zero. We were not independent, nor did we have the right to development. It would be difficult to find a Latin American country in worse conditions.

As the power of the empire grew to the point of it turning into the largest world power, making a Revolution in Cuba became a very difficult task. A few men were able to dream of it, but no one could give themselves individual credit for what was an epic feat that was a mixture of ideas, deeds and sacrifices on the part of many people, throughout many years, in many parts of the world.

With those ingredients it was possible to win the full independence of Cuba, and a social revolution that has resisted with honor more than 50 years of acts of aggression and the United States blockade.

In my particular case, no doubt by pure chance, from these heights of life I can offer testimony of actions, and if that testimony has any value for the new generation, that is due to the efforts of serious, rigorous researchers whose work over decades collected data that helped me to reconstruct a large part of the content of this book, which I decided to title La Victoria Estratégica (The Strategic Victory).

The circumstances that led me to those acts of war are indelibly stored in my mind. It remains a satisfactory experience for me to recall them because otherwise I would be unable to explain why I arrived at the convictions which, at the end of the day, have determined the course of my existence.

I was not born a politician, although from early childhood I observed events that, once recorded in my mind, helped me to understand the realities of the world.

In my native Birán, there were only two facilities that did not belong to my family, the telegraph office and the little public school. There, they sat me in the first row because there wasn’t, and couldn’t have been, anything resembling a day care center. Compulsorily, I learned to read and write. In 1933, when I was still six years old, the teacher, who didn’t even receive the salary that the government owed her, on the pretext that the boy was intelligent, took me to Santiago de Cuba where her family lived in a very humble and almost unfurnished house, which leaked all over when it rained. In that city, they couldn’t even send me to a school like the one in Birán.

After many months without going to school, or doing anything apart from listening to scales being played on an old piano by the sister of the teacher, an unemployed music teacher, I learned to add, subtract, multiply and divide, thanks to the tables printed on the red cover of a notebook that they gave me to practice handwriting in, and which nobody ever set or revised.

In the old house where they first lodged me, seven of us, including the teacher’s sister and father, ate from a little canteen that they brought once a day. I became acquainted with hunger believing that it was appetite, chasing the last grain of rice with one of the prongs of my little fork, and repairing my own shoes with sewing thread.

Opposite that modest timber house where we lived a high school was permanently occupied by the army; I saw soldiers striking other people with the butts of their guns. I could write a book on those memories. It was the children’s institution to which that humble teacher took me, in a society in which money reigned absolute.

My family had been deceived and I didn’t even realize what the situation was; the deception made me lose time, but it taught me a lot about the factors that determined it. After various episodes, at the age of eight, in January of 1935, I entered the first grade of a school run by La Salle Brothers, very close to the first cathedral that the Spanish conquerors had erected in Cuba. Another rich and new apprenticeship was beginning.

I entered that school as a day student, living in a new home, very close to the one mentioned previously, to which the music teacher, the sister of the Birán teacher had moved. We came to be three siblings living with that family: Angelita, Ramón and I, with the room and board for each one of us paid for. Their father had died the previous year. Physical hunger no longer existed, although I was still obliged to practice the famous arithmetic rules until I was bored stiff. Even so, I was fed up with that house and consciously rebelled for the first time in my life; I refused to eat certain tasteless vegetables sometimes imposed on me, and broke all the formal education rules, sacred in that family house of exquisitely French culture, acquired in Santiago de Cuba itself. The family was expanded by marriage to include a Haitian consul. But my rebellion became so unbearable that they packed me off to boarding school. They had threatened me with that more than once to discipline me, not knowing that it was exactly what I wanted. What for other boys was hard, signified freedom for me. They never even took me to the movies! I would enjoy the delights of a boarding student. It was the first prize that I received in my life. I was happy. From that time my problems were others. I had arrived in Santiago two years ahead, and entered the La Salle Brothers School some years behind. I completed first and second grade with ease. That school was wonderful. As a rule I returned to Birán three times a year: Christmas, Easter and summer vacations, when Ramón and I were completely free.

From the third grade in the La Salle school I passed to the fifth as a reward for my grades, in this way making up for lost time. For the first trimester, everything went well: good marks and excellent relationships with my new classmates. I received the blank ticket given every week to students for good behavior, with the usual problems of any pupil. But then an unfortunate incident happened with one of the members of the congregation, the boarding students’ inspector.

The school had a wide stretch of land on the other side of Santiago Bay, called Renté. It was a place for the congregation’s retreat and rest. They took some boarding students there on Thursdays and Sundays, days when there were no school activities. There was a good sports field. I addition, I played sports, swam, fished, explored. Not far from the entrance to the bay, one could see the traces of the Naval Battle of Santiago in the form of large missiles adorning the entrance of the buildings. One Sunday after our return, I had a trivial dispute with another boarder when we were traveling on the El Cateto ferry from Renté to the Santiago docks.

We had cleared up the argument right after reaching the school; but because of it, that authoritarian brother from the religious order open-handedly struck me in the face with all the strength of his arms. He was young and strong. I was stunned, with the blows ringing in my ears. Before he did so, he had called me aside, when it was already almost dark. He didn’t even let me explain. In the long corridor where he took me nobody saw us. Two or three weeks later, he tried to humiliate again with a rap on the head for talking in line. On that second occasion I was among the first to leave breakfast because we pupils always tried to get the first place in line in order to play with rubber balls for a while before class.

I was carrying a buttered roll in my hand, another of our habits on leaving the dining room after rushing down the first meal of the day, I threw it in the inspector’s face and then I went for him with my hands and feet, in front of boarding and day students, in a way that his authority and his abusive methods were greatly undermined. It was an act that was recalled in that school for quite some time.

I was 11 years old then and I remember his name well. However, I do not wish to repeat them. I haven’t heard anything about him in more than 70 years. I do not hold any rancor against him. Regarding the student who motivated the incident, many years after the revolutionary triumph, I learned that his conduct remained impeccable and serious.

However, the event had its consequences for me. The incident had taken place some weeks before Christmas when we had two-and-a-half weeks’ vacation. He continued to be an inspector and I, as a pupil; we both totally ignored each other. Out of elemental dignity, my conduct was impeccable. When our parents came to find us, evidently summoned by them, they concealed the truth from them and accused my brothers and I of extremely bad conduct. "Your three sons are the biggest bandits that have ever been through this school," they told my father. I found that out from what he sadly recounted to other farmer friends who used to visit him on New Year’s Eve. Raúl was just six years old, Ramón was always known for his kindness and I was no bandit.

I had a hard time persuading them to send me back to Santiago to study; Ramón and Raúl, who had nothing to do with the problem, remained in Birán for the rest of that year. I was enrolled in January 1938 as a day pupil at Dolores College, run by the Jesuit Order, which was much more demanding and rigorous in terms of studies but more high class and rich than its rival, the La Salle Brothers.

This time, it befell me to live in the home of a Spanish trader, a friend of my father; there, of course, I suffered no kind of material hardship but was a stranger in that house, where I lived until I finished fifth grade.

In the early summer, my older sister Angelita also came to that house to prepare for her entry into the high school diploma course. A black teacher was hired to give her classes, and she was guided by an enormous book containing the material to be studied for the entry exam. I attended her classes. She was the best teacher and, perhaps, one of the finest people I have known in my life. It occurred to her that I should also study the entry material and that for the first year of high school so that I could take the exam as soon as I reached the age to enroll in high school, one year later. She aroused in me a tremendous interest in studying. That was the only reason that I was prepared to put up with the Spanish trader’s house in that vacation period after finishing fifth grade as a day student in Dolores.

I fell ill at the end of that summer and was admitted to the Colonia Española Hospital in Santiago de Cuba, where I was a patient for almost three months. There were no summer vacations that year. In that beneficial society hospital, for two pesos a month – equivalent to two dollars – people had the right to medical services. Very few of them, however, could cover that expense. I had been operated on for appendicitis and after 10 days, the external wound became infected. The study plans devised by the teacher had to be forgotten. At the end of that year, 1938, we three brothers were reunited once again as boarders at Dolores College.

In sixth grade, having missed several weeks of classes, I had to make a tremendous effort to get up to scratch. A new stage was beginning. I studied hard in geography, astronomy, arithmetic, history, grammar and English.

I decided to write a letter to the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, with his wheelchair, the tone of his voice and his friendly face, had aroused my sympathies. Great expectation, one morning the school authorities announced the great event: "Fidel is corresponding with the president of the United States."

Roosevelt had replied to my letter. That’s what we believed. What really arrived was a message from the embassy informing us that they had received it and thanking me for it. What a great man, now we had a friend: the president of the United States! In spite of everything that I learned later, and perhaps because of it, I think that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who fought against personal adversity and adopted a correct position in the face of fascism, was not capable of ordering the assassination of an adversary and, from what is known about him, it is highly probable that he would not have dropped atomic bombs on two defenseless Japanese cities nor have unleashed the Cold War, two absolutely unnecessary and morally vile acts.

At that college of the long-established bourgeoisie in Cuba’s largest and most easterly province, there was greater academic rigor and discipline than at La Salle. They were Jesuits, almost all of them of Spanish origin, anointed as priests at an advanced stage of their training, in which they had to act as members of the Order in certain tasks or responsibilities. The school prefect was Father García, an upright but friendly and accessible man who communicated with the pupils.

From first grade in elementary school until the last one of high school, my vacations were always in Birán, a region of plains, plateaus and peaks rising almost 1,000 meters, natural forests, pine forests, rivers and pools; there I learned about nature at close hand, and was free from the controls imposed on me in school, in the homes of the families where I boarded in Santiago or at my own home in Birán; although always defended by my mother and with the tolerant tutelage of my father, given that I was now a student past sixth grade and, for that reason, I enjoyed increasing prestige within the family.

But this is not the place to talk about that, just the bare minimum indispensable for understanding the issue that I tackle in this book.
After Dolores College, I myself made the decision to transfer to Belén College in the Cuban capital. There, contrary to what happened at the La Salle College in Santiago de Cuba, the teacher directly responsible for the boarders – of whom there were more than 100 – Father Llorente, was not an authoritarian person and, far from being an enemy, he became a friend. Spanish by birth, like almost all the Jesuits in that college, he was at the stage prior to being invested as a priest. One of his brothers, older than him, was a priest in the Eskimo communities in Alaska and, under the title of En el país de los eternos hielos (In the Country of Eternal Ice) wrote accounts of the life, customs and activities of those Native American peoples in a virgin landscape, that filled us pupils with amazement.

Llorente had been a health worker in the Spanish Civil War; he told us the dramatic story of prisoners who faced the firing squads at the end of that battle. His task, along with others who performed the same function, was to certify that they were dead before burying them. Father Llorente did not discuss politics, neither do I recall him expressing an opinion on the matter. He was a Jesuit who was proud of his religious order. He encouraged activities that put to the test his pupils’ spirit of sacrifice and character. We were both planning a crocodile hunt in the Zapata Swamp, where there were thousands of them, and in 1945, during the final summer vacations, we organized a plan to ascend the Turquino. The schooner that should have taken us from Santiago de Cuba to Ocujal by sea wouldn’t start all night long and there was no other way. We had to suspend the plan. I remember that I was carrying one of the 12-caliber automatic shotguns, which I took from home. How that excursion would have helped me when I became a guerrilla combatant, whose principal stronghold was precisely in that region!

When I graduated in Humanities at the age of 18, I was an athlete, a scout, mountain climber, an enthusiast with weapons – which I learned to use with my father – and a good student of the subjects taught at the school where I studied.

The year that I graduated, they named me "Best Athlete" in the school and scout leader, with the highest grade awarded there. My mother was very pleased by the applause of those present at the graduation night. For the first time in her life, she had a formal dress made for ceremonies. She was one of the people who most helped me with my study intentions.´´

In the school yearbook, corresponding to the course in which I graduated, a photograph of me appears with the following caption:

Fidel Castro (1942-1945). Distinguished himself in all subjects related to the humanities. Excellence and fraternal, he was a true athlete, always defending the college’s flag with valor and pride. He has learned how to win the admiration and affection of all. He is to study Law and we have no doubt that he will fill the book of his life with brilliant pages. Fidel has the makings and will not lack artistry.

In truth, I have to say that I was better at mathematics than grammar. I found the former more logical, more exact. I studied Law because I used to argue a lot and everyone said that I was going to be a lawyer. I had no vocational guidance.

The truth is that the elite schools threw out onto the streets waves of high school students lacking elemental political knowledge. On a fundamental issue such as the history of humanity, we were first told about the usual military adventures of our species, from the Persians to World War II, stories that captivate boys and young men alike.

The business of manufacturing and selling toy weapons today is almost as vast as the trade in real weapons. Of the social system that leads to such insanity and to wars themselves, we were not taught a single word.

We learned about the history of Greece and Rome, but civilizations as ancient as those of India and China were barely mentioned, and only to tell us of the military adventures of Alexander the Great and the voyages of Marco Polo. Without these two countries, it is now impossible to write history. We never even dreamed of being told about the Mayan and Aymara-Quechua civilizations, colonialism or imperialism.

When I graduated in humanities from high school, only one university existed, that of Havana, we students ended up there with our absence of political knowledge. With few exceptions, almost all of the students came from petty bourgeois families, who painstakingly wanted a better future for their children. Few belonged to the upper class and almost none of them from the poor sectors of society. Many of those from wealthy families went on to higher education studies in the United States, if they hadn’t done so since high school. It was not about individual guilt, it was an inheritance of class. The incorporation into the Revolution in Cuba of the vast majority of university students is evidence of the value of education and consciousness in human beings.

Perhaps some of the things referred to up to here will be helpful in understanding what came after.

I did not attend University from the first day, because I rejected the humiliating practices of the so-called novitiates, consisting of the enforced shaving of the new arrivals. I asked for a very short haircut to identify myself as a new student.

After solving the complicated problem of lodgings, I went to the university stadium, to find out how to join in sports activities. There was basketball, baseball, track and field, everything that I liked. It cost me a lot of work to release myself from the commitment to the basketball coach in Belén. Some time back I had agreed to continue as a disciple of his in that sport, but he was the coach for an aristocratic club. I explained to him that I couldn’t be a university student and play on another team against this one. He didn’t understand and I broke off relations with him. I began to train on the university basketball team. The college also demanded that I play baseball for my faculty and I said that I would.

The Faculty of Law leaders asked me to stand as a subject delegate and I had no objection.

I was obliged to do many things in one day and I lived in an outlying district, where Lidia, the oldest sister on my father’s side, and always attentive to and affectionate with us, decided to live after she moved from Santiago de Cuba to Havana when I began my university studies.

One day I discovered that I didn’t have time to even take a breath. I sacrificed sport and decided to fulfill the task asked of me by the school leaders. I fought hard to win the representation, as a delegate of the subject of Anthropology, which required special effort. In that task, I was standing against a former cadre, for whom a leadership post in the school signified a profession in politics. That is how I began my activity in that sphere.

I hadn’t imagined to what point politicking, pretence and lies prevailed in our country. But I didn’t know that from the first day. When the election was held, I obtained more than five votes for every one of my adversary, and thus could contribute to the victory of candidates from our tendency in other subjects. It was in that way that, within a few months, given the number of votes won, I became the first-year student representative in one of the University of Havana’s largest schools. That gave me a certain importance, but it was very early on. I had no idea at all of the interests that moved around that University.

As I gradually became familiar with it, I also came to know its rich history. It had been one of the first founded in the colonial era. Illustrious figures in culture and science were recorded in bronze and marble statues that were paid tribute to, or plazas, buildings and university institutions were named after them.

I felt a special admiration for the eight students of Medicine, shot by Spanish volunteers on November 27, 1871, having been charged with profaning the tomb of a reactionary journalist who served the colonial regime, an act that, as confirmed afterward, did not even take place.

Right by my school was a little park named Lídice – after a Czech village where the Nazis perpetrated an atrocious massacre – which added elements of internationalism.

The names of Martí, Maceo, Céspedes, Agramonte and others appeared everywhere and aroused the admiration and interest of many of us, without their social origin being of any importance. It was not the atmosphere that was breathed in the elite private school where I studied for my high school diploma, whose teachers came from and were educated in Spain, where a significant part of our culture was engendered, but also slavery and the colonial period.

At that stage, after the ‘44 elections, the country was presided over by a professor of Physiology, who left university in the 30s when, in the midst of the great world economic crisis, the Machado dictatorship was overthrown and, for a few months, a revolutionary provisional government was created. In that process, within the framework of an independence limited by the Platt Amendment, the students, together with the combative Cuban working class and people in general, played a fundamental role. Ramón Grau San Martín, the physiology professor, was appointed president of the government in 1933. A young anti-imperialist revolutionary, Antonio Guiteras, the representative of other popular forces, appointed minister of government, was the most outstanding figure of those months, on account of the brave and anti-imperialist measures that he adopted.

Fulgencio Batista, who came from the revolutionary military sector of sergeants and professional soldiers and had risen to chief of the Army, subsequently taken control of by the reactionary sectors and the embassy of the United States itself, defeated that radical government, which lasted barely 100 days.

The working class had been decisive in the fall of Gerardo Machado. The revolutionary general strike, basically organized by the small party of the communists, under the brilliant and vibrant leadership of the revolutionary poet Rubén Martínez Villena, initiated the battle for the overthrow of the Machado dictatorship. It is worth recalling because the idea of a revolutionary general strike was associated with our subsequent struggle, from the assault on the Moncada garrison onward. It was the fundamental weapon utilized after the final successful offensive of the Rebel Army, which led to the total victory of the people on January 1, 1959.

Anti-communism had emerged in force in the 40s, with the instilling of reflexes and mind control via the mass media. The bases had been created for military and political domination of the world, in our higher institute of learning very little remained of the revolutionary spirit of the 1930s.

The party created by the professor, which took him to the presidency in virtue of past glories, took the name used by Martí in order to organize the last War of Independence: the Cuban Revolutionary Party, to which they added the epithet "Auténtico" (Authentic).

When scandals began to break on all sides, an eminent senator from that same party, Eduardo Chibás, led the exposé of the government. He came from a wealthy but unquestionably honorable family, something not usual in the traditional parties of Cuba. He had a half-hour program every Sunday at 8:00 p.m. on the most listened-to radio station throughout the nation. It was the first case in our homeland of the unusual promotion that that mass communication media. His name was known in every corner of the country. Television did not yet exist in Cuba. In that way, in spite of reigning illiteracy, a potential political mass movement emerged among workers in the city and in the rural areas, and professionals and the petty bourgeoisie.

Marxist ideas developed with more facility among the most advanced industrial workers and outstanding intellectuals. Rubén Martínez Villena died young, victim of tuberculosis, shortly after his most glorious work, the overthrow of the Machado dictatorship. His poems remained and were remembered and repeated. But anti-communist prejudices, always emanating from the privileged and dominant sectors of Cuban society, continued multiplying, from the brilliant days during which Julio Antonio Mella created the FEU (University Student Federation) and, together with Baliño – a comrade of José Martí in his struggle for independence – founded the first Communist Party of Cuba.

The corrupt government of Grau San Martín was chaotic, irresponsible and cynical. It was interested in controlling the University and the few public institutions where one could study for the high school diploma. Its fundamental instrument was not repression, but corruption. The University was dependent on state funds.

An unscrupulous individual was appointed minister of education, many millions of dollars were embezzled. Nothing resembling a literacy program was implemented.

Agrarian reform and other measures promulgated by the 1940 Constitution passed into oblivion. Batista had left the country, loaded down with money, to live in Florida. He left behind in Cuba an Armed Forces full of promotions and privileges and a not insignificant number of followers directly benefited with posts of their choice in Congress and the municipalities, and jobs in the bureaucratic apparatus of social institutions and private enterprises.

Worst of all was the pseudo-revolutionary burden that came to power in Cuba with Grau San Martín. They were people who, in one way or another, had been anti-Machado and anti-Batista. Thus they considered themselves revolutionaries. The worst of these people were given important posts in the repressive police, such as in the Bureau of Investigations, the Secret Police, the Mobile Police and other corps from this institution. The emergency courts were maintained, with the faculty of arresting citizens without any right to bail. In summary, the whole of Batista’s repressive apparatus remained unchanged.

A series of organizations with different names emerged, made up of people who had relations with Guiteras and other eminent leaders of the struggle against Machado and Batista. Within the ranks of that pseudo-revolution there were serious and courageous people, who considered themselves revolutionaries , an idea and a title that always attracted young people in Cuba. The press assigned them that epithet with all rigor, when in real terms what had occurred was a dramatic stage of frustrated revolution; there was no serious social program and far less objectives that would lead to the country’s independence. The only veritably revolutionary and anti-imperialist program was that of the party founded by Mella and Baliño, and then led by Rubén Martínez Villena. This young and courageous leader, full of passion, proclaimed in a poem: "There is a need for a charge to kill rogues,/ to complete the work of revolutions…" But the Communist Party of Cuba was isolated.

Among the thousands of university students that I knew, the number of conscious anti-imperialists and active communists was no more than 50 or 60 out of the total registered, which amounted to more than 12,000. I myself, an enthusiast of protests against that government, felt impelled by other values that I later understood were still distant from the revolutionary awareness that I acquired later.

There were thousands of students who repudiated the reigning corruption, abuses of power and society’s ills. Very few of them belonged to the haute bourgeoisie. On those occasions when we needed to go out into the streets, they didn’t hesitate to do so.

Our university had relations with Dominican exiles fighting against Trujillo, exiles with whom there was full solidarity. Also the Puerto Ricans, who were demanding independence under the leadership of Pedro Albizu Campos, had its support. Those were elements of an internationalist conscience present in our young people, and which also moved me, to whom they had given the presidency of the Pro-Dominican Democracy Committee and the Pro-Puerto Rican Independence Committee.

One stage of my university studies would help an understanding of how I lived there. When I began the second year of the degree, in 1946, I knew much more about our university and our country. Nobody had to invite me to take part in the Faculty of Law elections. I myself persuaded an active and intelligent student, Baudilio Castellanos, who was beginning his career, to stand for the same subject as I had the previous year. I knew him well because we were from the same eastern area; he had studied for his high school diploma in a school ruled by Protestant religionists. His father was a pharmacist in the little town of the Marcané sugar mill, owned by a U.S. transnational, four kilometers from my house in Birán.

We selected the most active and enthusiastic from among the first-year students to make up the slate. I had the full support of the second year, where my opponents couldn’t even find a sufficient core of students to draw up a slate against me. We implemented the same line as the year before and, in the elections, our tendency won an overwhelming victory. We already had an ample majority among students at the Faculty of Law, and we could decide who would be the president of the students of the faculty, one of the largest of the University of Havana. Those in the fifth and final year were not many, the fourth year corresponded with the year that the degree course was raised from four to five years, and very few had entered that year. We did not have the majority of the delegates, but we did have the overwhelming majority of the students.

At that time we entered into contact with the Communist Party and also, with members of the Communist Youth, like Raul Valdés Vivó, Alfredo Guevara and others. I met Favio Bravo, an intelligent and capable person, who headed the Communist Party of Cuba.

I could have left things as they were and have waited another year. At the end of the day, my relations with politically neutral delegates from higher years were not bad. But the competitive spirit within me won out, and perhaps the self-sufficiency and vanity which generally accompany many young people, even in our era.

That does not mean that I would have had another opportunity in waiting for a third normal year. Commitments already contracted took me along another road. But before that, I should note that I lived through the greatest dangers of losing my life at barely 20 years of age, without any benefit to the really noble cause that I discovered later.

In fact, our activity and strength prematurely caught the attention of the owners of the only university in the country. Our higher education center had acquired particular importance on account of its historical roots and its role within the diminished republic, which was born of the imposition of the Platt Amendment on the Cuban nation when it was liberated from Spain. The new presidency of the Federation of University Students was about to be decided, because the former president had moved on to occupy a high position in the Grau government.

Given my rebellious nature, I faced up to the powerful group that controlled the university. In that way the days – weeks really – passed without any other company than the solidarity of my first and second year compañeros from the Faculty of Law. There were times when I left the university guarded by groups of students who stayed tight around me. But, despite that, I went to class and activities every day, until one day they announced that I was prohibited from entering the precinct any more.

I once related that, the next day, a Sunday, I went to the beach with my girlfriend and, lying face down, I cried because I was determined to defy that prohibition and understood what that meant. I knew that the enemy had reached the limit of its tolerance. In my Quixotic mind there was no alternative but to defy the threat. I could get hold of a weapon, and would take it with me.

On receiving news of the situation created and the decision that I had taken, a friend of mine, a member of the Ortodoxo Party, who I knew because he liked sports and frequently visited the university, recounted to me his experiences of confrontations with the dictatorships of Machado and Batista, talked a lot with me, and knew about our struggles, moved heaven and earth to avoid the worst.

After this countless events took place which I have recounted on various opportunities, and I do not wish to add to what I am expounding here, already extensive; but I feel the need to state that, from that point, I was decided to everything and held a weapon. The experiences of my university life served me for the long and difficult struggle that I would undertake shortly afterward as a Cuban follower of Martí and revolutionary Cuban. My thinking matured at an accelerated rate. Barely three years after I graduated, I assaulted with my compañeros in ideals the second military plaza in the country. It was the re-initiation of the armed insurrection of the people of Cuba for their full independence and for the republic of justice dreamed of by José Martí, our national hero.

After the triumph of the 1st of January, known and tireless historians, headed by Pedro Alvarez Tabío – and thanks to the initiative of Celia Sánchez, who was present and fulfilled important missions in defense of that revolutionary bastion – toured every inch of the Sierra Maestra where events developed, and collected fresh information from people in every home and place where we were, filing the information without which nobody – myself included, of course – could take responsibility for every detail that gives total veracity to what I expound here.

On the other hand, only somebody who was the leader and chief of that force of inexperienced combatants could take responsibility for a rigorous history of events in the 74 days of combat, in which we revolutionaries desperately succeeded in destroying the plans of the Armed Forces of that time, advised and equipped by the United States, and transformed the impossible into the possible. There is no other form of honoring the fallen in that epic feat, we had no precedents in our country for a battle of that nature. The glorious struggles for independence had ended almost half a century before. The weapons, the communications were all very different in another era; tanks, aircraft, bombs containing up to 500 tons of TNT did not exist. It was necessary to begin from zero. In spite of my origins, from when I graduated I had a Marxist-Leninist concept of our society and a profound conviction of justice.

I selected the best of the excellent prose of the historian Alvarez Tabío and purged it of the unnecessary. For their part cartographer Otto Hernández Garcini, military experts and designers created the maps contained in this book, where such plans were needed for an analysis of the subject by weapons experts. It still remains to explain how, after the final enemy offensive that broke the backbone of the dictatorship, as Che said, we transferred our concepts of fighting to the plains and, in just five months, destroyed the total force of 100,000 armed men who were defending the regime and took all their weapons.