Camilo Cienfuegos Gorriaran.
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"We had to hike for more than 40 days, with the South Coast and the compass as only guides. We marched for 15 days trough knee-deep water and mud. We could only travel at night to avoid ambushes and while on a 31-day trek through Camaguey we only ate eleven times. After four days of famine we ate a mare... almost all our animals died in this way during the walk."
There is another icon in the Cuban Revolution. The Hero of Yaguajay is not as famous as Che Guevara or Fidel Castro, but his courage and charisma still are a great example to the revolution. Che Guevara called him la imagen del pueblo (the image of the people) and with Guevara, he is one of the most popular figures in Cuba. A man who, more than forty years after his death, still is capable to melt a woman's heart.
Camilo Cienfuegos Gorriaran is born into a humble family in Havana on February 6 1932. His parents were from Spain. As a young child, he is very anxious to learn and reads whatever comes into his hands. The young Camilo is good in sports. He is a good swimmer (an amazing thing at that time) and loves baseball. Little more is known of his childhood, except that he was a very cheerful child, a quality he would keep until his death in 1959.
The bad economic condition of the family would have a great influence on his adolescence, as it forced Camilo to drop out of art school and begin to work in a tailor's shop. In 1953, still only 21 years old, he leaves for the US.
Of this period in his life, the correspondence with his parents still exists, in which one can conclude the awakening of his social consciousness. He is disturbed with social injustice with the poor in America. He decides to act and participates in various anti-Batista activities.
Soon arrested by the American immigration authorities in 1955, they deported him back to Cuba. There he joined various student demonstrations in Havana, where the police subsequently beats him. By now a die-hard anti-Batista, he returns to the US, where he hears of Fidel Castro's promise to liberate Cuba. From there he travels to Mexico and becomes one of the last volunteers for the Granma expedition.
After the disastrous landing of the Granma and the battle near Alegría de Pío, Cienfuegos is among the dozen revolutionaries who managed to escape to the Sierra Maestra. Soon, Castro promotes him to the rank of commandante and in the middle of 1958, he receives the instruction to lead a guerrilla column to Las Villas Province. Castro can not have dreamed of a better commander. The expedition becomes one of the most arduous one can imagine. Mainly travelling by night to avoid Batista troops, he has enough self-determination and authority to give his hungry and tired men the courage to finish the march of six weeks.
Cienfuegos and his men would become the heart of the revolution in the north of the province, while Guevara led the fighting farther south.
He fought one of the final battles of the revolution in Yaguajay in Sancti Spíritus Province, where some 350 Batista troops had fortified themselves in a barracks. Eleven days of bitter fighting were required to force the captain, Alfredo Abon Lee, to order the white flag raised. At one point, Cienfuegos used a homemade tank fitted with a flame-thrower, el Dragon I, to attack the barracks. The defenders got it to a standstill with a rocket. Afterwards, they send a train loaded with dynamite to the building, but it derailed.
These are clear examples of the self-determination of Cienfuegos. He would have loved to help Guevara in the assault of Santa Clara, but the stubborn resistance in Yaguajay prevented him from doing so. Only on noon of December 31, when Guevara already held Santa Clara, surrendered the men in the barracks.
Cienfuegos was a good friend of Fidel and Che. With the success of the revolution, Castro named him military chief of Havana, and later the revolutionary's army's head of staff. In this function, Castro sent him to Camaguey in October 1959 to arrest Huber Matos, who had been plotting a counterrevolution. A week later, when returning to Havana, Cienfuegos disappeared as his Cessna plunged into the open sea. A great expedition turned without result, as it could not find his remains.
An analysis of the accident could not point out the precise cause. Some say that Castro no longer wanted Cienfuegos, and that he had to vanish. Although there exists various jokes of Castro being jealous of Cienfuegos' success with women, and although ideas about the revolution's development between them (as between Castro en Guevara) sometimes did not coincide, these suspects are purely speculation, moreover because the revolution was not even one year old.
Fact is that with the disappearing of Cienfuegos, the Cuban revolution lost one of its most notable figures. Fidel was the brains, Che the heart, but Camilo was the charisma, the personality of the revolution. As stubborn as Che and Fidel, he was the good-natured man who tried to convince you with his smile. While Che and Fidel discussed among each other if the revolution had to go communistic or not, it did not matter much to Camilo as long as the working people got better.
That is why he is so popular, and that is why every year on October 28, on the anniversary of his death, tens of thousands of children toss a flower into the sea. Una flor por Camilo, to bring honour to the man who came up for the ordinary people. They shall not forget him very quickly there…
February 14 2001.
