This Man Castro

By ponyback down a precipitous trail in Cuba's eastern Sierra Maestra, TIME Contributing Editor Sam Halper last week brought out a dispatch on Rebel Commander Fidel Castro's personality, plans and politics:

Well after dark, in a thundering rain, the rebels' jeep stopped in front of a big, wooden-walled barn with a palm-thatched roof. I hurried inside and blinked at an extraordinary scene: an old woman tending grandchildren, rebel troops milling around, guitarists strumming, and under a dim kerosene lamp, rocking in a chair, surrounded by kids seated on upturned 5-gal. cans, the bearded Rebel Castro. In the next days and nights, always on the move, I talked at length to Fidel Castro and got a thorough look at his ragtag, fanatic force.

Articulate Fighter. Arriving with me from outside the territorio de Fidel was a messenger with a Paper-Mate pen, which he gave to Castro. The rebel chieftain regarded it amusedly, unscrewed the cap, took out a typed onionskin message from Fidelistas in Santiago de Cuba and read it, humming and rocking. Castro is a fighter; 16 months ago he invaded Cuba from a yacht. But he is also an articulate man interested in words, manifestoes, books (he treasures a volume of Montesquieu) and the language of ideas.

"We have assumed the responsibility of throwing out Batista's dictatorship and re-establishing the constitutional rights and freedoms of the people," Castro says. "Our first fight is for political rights--and after that for social rights." At Havana University ten years ago, Castro hotheadedly espoused a series of student-radical notions, e.g., nationalization of Cuba's U.S.-owned power and telephone companies. Now he says: "I am still the same revolutionary, but I have had time to study the political and economic factors. I understand that some ideas I used to have would not be good for Cuba. I do not believe in nationalization."

He now advocates amplified social security, along with speeded-up industrialization, to fight Cuba's chronic joblessness. In answer to Batista's charge that Castro's movement is "proSoviet and pro-Communist," friends of Castro point to the character of his army. Almost to a man, they are Roman Catholics, who wear religious medals on their caps or on strings around their necks. For the sake of getting on with the war, Castro says, he avoids fruitless political discussions with his one outrightly pro-Red captain.

Though he is often Olympian in his thunderbolt pronunciamentos, calling for ''total, implacable war," face to face Castro is strictly realistic. Questioned about the possibility that Batista might crush the rebels' proposed general strike, he said: "If Batista loses, he loses for good; if I lose, I will just start over again." If he wins, Castro says, he proposes freer labor unions, a crackdown on corruption and punishment for government "criminals"--including bringing Batista to book. These measures imply a great deal of control over Cuba's future by Fidel Castro. He denies all presidential (or dictatorial) ambitions: "I can do more for my country giving an example of disinterestedness." But he insists that "our movement has the right to appoint the Provisional President." For that job, his present choice is a respectable but unknown lower-court judge named Manuel Urrutia (now exiled in the U.S.), largely because Urrutia once spoke up for the right of rebels to oppose dictatorships.

Untidy Troops. Castro's unpaid volunteer troops form a disorganized, barebones partisan army. They wear blue jeans or khaki pants, Truman shirts or Eisenhower jackets. About 10% have modern weapons, Garands captured from the Cuban army. The rest carry .22-cal. target rifles, double-barreled shotguns, Belgian sporting rifles, Springfields, cheap nickel-plated revolvers, an occasional vintage Krag or Winchester. They also have a couple of dozen .30-cal. machine guns, a few mortars and Browning automatic rifles. Castro runs a tiny arms factory to make tin-can-sized grenades out of sheet metal, TNT and Scotch tape.

The troops, mostly hardy Sierra Maestra boys, are grouped in widely separated "columns" under captains. The men march in untidy ranks as much as 15 miles a day on the theory that standing still is perilous. There is no drill, no inspection, no radio communication, no headquarters. Four women march with the men: the wife of an imprisoned rebel, the widow of a rebel killed by cops, a girl once badly beaten by soldiers, a doctor's daughter. Dedicated to helping overthrow Batista, they cook, run messages, keep the force's slim records, guard its contributed funds and buy its food from Sierra village stores and peasants.

Reveille is sounded before daybreak by transistor radios blasting out the morning news. At their irregular meals, the men eat rice or boiled starchy roots, dried codfish or bananas, sometimes boa constrictor or raccoon. They march, often dry and thirsty, through the hot midday. Castro moves along with them, joshing his men, examining their weapons, dressing-down laggards.

High Morale. Nothing about the appearance of Fidel's force would lead me to think it could fight, but so far this motley army has not been subdued by Batista's 29,000 men. Part of the reason, says Castro ironically, is that the government's "soldiers are not convinced of the justice of their work." More seriously, he goes on to say: "If they had been fighting for an ideal, they could have beaten us 30 times. But no man is supposed to die for $35 a month."

The other part of the reason, of course, is that Castro's men have a cause. They believe in him (and hate Batista) fanatically; they believe that they are fighting for their country's freedom. Their real strength lies in the fact that they are obviously willing to die--and for nothing a month.

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