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A Front-Row Seat To Witness The Battle Of Santa Clara

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By FELIPE YANES

Special to the Tribune

Published: January 25, 2009

The Battle of Santa Clara, which ended 50 years ago on the morning of Jan. 1, 1959, was the major conflict of the Cuban Revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.

It pitted approximately 3,000 of then-Cuban President Fulgencio Batista's soldiers against a force of 400 guerrillas under the command of Ernesto "Che" Guevara and featured tanks in the streets, a derailed ammunition train, snipers, fighter planes and 500-pound bombs.

In the annals of urban warfare, the battle was minor in scope. But for those of us who were there, it may as well have been Stalingrad in 1942. That such a victory could be won by the few over the many was a tribute to the citizens of Santa Clara, who formed a large fifth column to aid the rebels.

The memories of those days begin for me with Saturday, Dec. 27, 1958.

As a typical third-grader, I was simply enjoying being out of school for the holidays - blissfully unaware of the serious events that were unfolding in Cuba at that time. I knew that there had recently been some bombing sabotage, including one explosion from a detonation in a building across the street from our house.

Occasionally, my mother had fretted for my father's safety if he worked later than usual at the bank.

However, as December was drawing to a close 50 years ago, I was simply and innocently looking forward to my upcoming eighth birthday and to the toy bonanza brought on Jan. 6 by the Three Kings, in whom I still believed.

After breakfast, my father said to me: "I'm going down to the tennis club. Do you want to come?"

Absolutely! We lived in a row house on Maceo Street, two blocks from the Villaclara Tennis Club, which seemed to be the greatest place in the whole world. The ground level had a 25-meter competition pool with an adjoining luncheonette, a three-wall squash/handball court, locker rooms, a weight-lifting room and a maintenance shop where kids were not allowed.

A wide staircase led to the upper level, which featured a one-lane bowling alley, a large ballroom that had dances almost every weekend, a dimly lit bar where children also were not allowed and a huge covered terrace that overlooked the tennis and basketball courts.

Smoke Signals Guerrilla Warfare

As we arrived that morning, a crowd of mostly adults had gathered on the terrace. They were jabbering, staring and pointing at the nearby hills beyond the courts.

From a distance of a mile or two, small puffs of smoke were visible and sounds of gunfire were audible. Closer, a couple of hundred yards away, we could actually see some of Che's guerrillas scurrying around. For those of us observing these events, it was like having a front-row seat at the newest Cinerama movie in real vivid Technicolor.

That illusion was shattered when, suddenly, a bullet ricocheted off the terrace floor about 20 feet from where we were standing. My father turned to me and said calmly, "We'd better get out of here."

We hustled back home and as soon as we arrived, my parents enlisted my help in doing something that seemed really peculiar to me. We cleared out the central bedroom in the house, one of the rooms that did not have an outside window.

We arranged dressers and chests of drawers from other rooms and created an enclosure by using the top of our dining room table and the blackboard my mother used for English classes to span the furniture pieces.

On top of the blackboard and the table, we stacked every mattress in the house providing a protective pad about three feet thick. The end result was a small shelter measuring approximately 10 feet by 6 feet wide and 5 feet high.

My parents, four kids, my grandmother and a young woman who cared for us and helped around the house spent the better part of four days in that makeshift fortification, which provided mostly psychological if not actual protection.

During the battle, my father crouched near the front door, looking and listening for signs of the government's airplanes. When he spotted or heard a plane, we would all scramble back into the shelter. Otherwise, we stayed in the interior hallway of the house and went into the kitchen or to the bathroom during lulls in the planes' strafing or bombing runs.

The fighter planes were based 170 miles away in Havana and would go back to refuel before making another attack on the rebel forces in Santa Clara.

I remember eating mostly saltine crackers and condensed milk during the breaks in the fighting. For emergency bathroom purposes, we kept a small ceramic potty within reach on top of the shelter.

One of my vivid memories is of a particularly strong bomb blast that shook our house enough to dislodge plaster from the ceiling. I remember the peculiar clinking sound of the plaster falling on the potty as clearly as if it were yesterday.

Guess Who Came To Visit

On the third or fourth day of the battle, two of Che's guerrillas came into our house. One of them had been my mother's student at the Universidad Central and had been fighting alongside Castro for a year or so.

He had stopped by with a companion merely to say hello. They were dirty and tired, had matted long hair and wild beards, and were very heavily armed. Never before had I seen anything like those two men, not in movies, books or television.

They looked to me like wild animals. But their manner was gentle, polite and educated, and they spoke so well that fascination overcame my shock.

My grandmother made coffee for them, and they sat in our living room with rifles at their side, sipping their drinks as if they did not have a care in the world.

As they left to rejoin the fight, I remember my mother saying to them in a soft voice, "Now, boys. Be very careful out there. We want to see you again soon."

Our nuclear family and house weathered the battle intact, although several acquaintances suffered in various degrees.

Our dentist, Dr. Fleites, and a friend were killed by a sniper with a single bullet as they peered out of a window facing the street in front of their house. A classmate of mine had a tank shell go right through his house, but, miraculously, no one was hurt.

The passing years have not dimmed the memories of those days. It is interesting that 50 years later, the calendar has turned over exactly the right number of times so that the days of the week for December 2008 were precisely as they were in 1958.

Perhaps that is what brings the memories back in an especially vivid way.

Our family, like so many others, left Cuba two years after the fundamentally noble cause of the revolution was hijacked by Marxist ideology. After moving around a bit, we settled happily in Tampa in the summer of 1962.

My father resumed his work as an accountant, and my mother taught Spanish at Chamberlain High School for 30 years. Both have retired and still live in the area.

As for me and my siblings, we are still around as well, and we count our blessings (when we think about it) that our parents had the foresight to take us out of Cuba and allow us to grow up in the greatest country in the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Writer Felipe Yanes, 58, is a chemical engineer who lives with his wife, Pam, in Tampa, where his mother and father, Juanita and Felipe Sr., still reside.

Do You Have A Story To Tell?

I Remember It Well is a feature of the Prime Time page that runs occasionally in the Getaway Section. E-mail your story to sackerman @tampatrib.com or mail typewritten submissions to Sherri Ackerman, The Tampa Tribune, 200 S. Parker Street, Tampa FL 33606. Be sure to include a contact phone number. Copies of photographs or jpegs are welcome. Submissions cannot be returned.

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