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"Petty Putsch." At that, the Communists almost missed the boat with Fidel. When Castro led a gang of young rebels in a foolhardy frontal assault on Batista's Moncada barracks in 1953, the old party-liners called it a "petty-bourgeois putsch." In 1957. when Castro went into the Sierra Maestra hills to start his guerrilla war, they again dismissed him as an ineffectual "adventurer"—a Communist phrase for amateurs. But Castro survived and grew stronger, and the possibility of an alliance began to dawn on both sides. Though Castro was a hero in the hills with great popularity among Cuba's peasants, he had little support in Havana itself. In April 1958 he called a general strike which failed miserably. Communists blamed the failure on the fact that they had not participated. Actually, the strike was doomed before it started. Cuba's workers were among the most advanced in Latin America; only seven countries paid higher industrial wages. The workers acted as if they had never heard of Fidel Castro.
Nonetheless, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, a middle-class intellectual who was generally considered No. 2 to Roca in the party, went into the hills to make contact with Castro's revolutionaries. Fidel already had a woolly-minded vision of himself as a Marxist messiah, and he apparently believed that the professional Communists had something to offer his revolution. When Castro came down from the hills to Havana in January 1959. Rodriguez came too, proudly sporting the rebel beard he still wears. Once more the Communists, in their search for power, had found someone to hang onto.
The Hour Is Coming. Bias Roca was ready with his apparatus, and with his made-in-Moscow policies. Now he offered both to Castro, who had defeated Batista but had not the vaguest idea how to run Cuba, or carry on his revolution.
Not to alarm Cubans, Castro loudly proclaimed that "this revolution is not Red, but olive green." Behind the scenes, Roca's men quietly took over indoctrination of the army, and set up the G-2 security force. The original 26th of July rebels, many of them anti-Batista and anti-Yanqiii but Cuban nationalists all the way, bitterly protested the intrusion. In October 1959, a bearded leader of Castro's rebel army, Huber Mates, resigned, saying that "the hour is coming when anyone who does not commune with Communism has to leave or be accused of being a traitor." Castro had him arrested on charges of treason and sentenced to 20 years in jail.