Story of the Sierra

A BURNING SUN PUNISHED THE FATIGUED TROOPS OF INFANTRY BATTALION 22 at noon on the 28th of June, 1958. I was attached as a company medical orderly to company N of the Early Strike Unit, and we left the plains of Providencia on the way to Santo Domingo, where the battalion of ex-Colonel Sánchez Mosquera had been encamped for many days. The man was a criminal and feared not only by the peasants of the area but by his own soldiers, who were daily witnesses to his vandalism.

Emaciated and hungry, we arrived at Mosquera's camp. He gave the order to Commander Viamonte, head of our battalion, to continue the march and penetrate upriver, as if we were going to an imaginary house where we were going to camp. We continued the march along the banks of the Yara, and we had not walked half an hour when we heard the first shots. At the beginning, it seemed to me an exploratory volley among the many that the Army makes before moving forward into dangerous places, but the intensity of the gunfire and the variety and abundance of noises produced by the arms told me I was in the presence of real combat.

For twenty days we had made our way through the Sierra without difficulties; until that moment my work as a medic had been limited to curing peasants in the area. During those days I was convinced that the rebels—if they even still maintained an important presence in that region—were in the frank position of passivity before the threat of the Army of the Dictatorship.

Now I found myself suddenly confronting the truth. Sánchez Mosquera was using us like Indian rabbits, without warning us at all of the danger to which his criminal and absurd order exposed us. Deeds like this brought about disaster in the Army's offensive against the rebel redoubts. Stupidity and lack of foresight on the part of Batista's military chiefs turned out to be fatal on the field of battle. All this, together with the presence of an ungraspable enemy, whose face was never seen, turned out to be discouraging for the troops. Day after day, they suffered in their own flesh the strategic errors of their superiors, seeing how the enemy aimed their strikes with mathematical precision and a wise familiarity of the terrain.

Minutes before the drama which would develop around us, we marched along confidently. It seemed that nothing under the intense tropical sun could change the luxurious and monotonous life of the mountain. Fatigue and sleep invaded my mind and my body, but the conflict began to become real around me without my knowing how. All the mountain seemed to shake itself out of the lethargic sleep which consumed it. My nerves, already tense, received every impact like a jolt. It was war. . . . There, in all its vertiginous and dramatic form, was the sad meaning of that word.

That day, my company went in the forefront, opening the march. Already only a few groups remained, dispersed and badly wounded. First was the bunker, located a few meters from the river Yara (in front of the ravine through which we eventually had to pass). The bunker destroyed the "point" made up of twenty men, officers and soldiers. Afterwards, a barrage of incredible intensity, so intense that it turned the previously peaceful place into a true inferno. By chance, I found myself a short distance from the point where the fiercest fighting was taking place, but a soldier on horseback spotted me, and, recognizing me by the Red Cross armband, ran toward me and pointed to a place where the Company was halted, yelling, "Get on, medic. . . . There are many wounded up there." With the backpack in which I carried medicine, I...