What I said about Pichirilo

I promised to answer the journalist Daily right away.

In her letter that I mentioned yesterday, she said:

“Comandante:

“My name is Daily Sánchez Lemus; I graduated in Journalism in 2006 and I have been working for the Cuban Television Information System ever since.

“My graduating thesis was on the journalism of Raúl Gómez García. I recall that at the end of 2005 and early 2006, I wrote to you on three occasions asking for more insight into the Son los Mismos and El Acusador underground newspapers and for any detail you might remember, or some special commentary on Gómez García.

“It wasn’t meant to be at that time and I received an answer to the three letters which asked me to get in touch with the Office of Historical Affairs of the Council of State. I know very well how much work you had and all your responsibilities and so I understood that my thesis had to come out without your testimony. And come out it did. “Raúl Gómez García, the Moncada Journalist” was the title I gave it, trying to show that that young man was not only a poet but a first-rate journalist.

“After finishing the paper, a friend whom I liked very much, and I still do, journalism professor Guillermo Cabrera Alvarez, told me: “I have so many things I have to write and I know I won’t have the time to do them all at the same time. I’ll give you a story.” And so it was, inspired by who knows what, that he opened one of the drawers in his desk and handed me a yellow envelope with the initial part of a love story. And thus I learned about Pichirilo, the Dominican who came on the Granma, whom you knew from the days of Cayo Confites

“For me, writing this story was more than something incredibly special, it was a tribute devoted to the history of my country, to the Dominican Republic and to Guillermo. Now it is just like I had sailed in the Granma and reached these waters along with all of you, and fought alongside Caamaño. Now, the Dominican Republic is much closer to me. I still have a lot left to research and to read, but I am trying to combine that research with my work.

“Ramón Emilio Mejías del Castillo, Pichirilo, came to be on the Granma because you knew what a good sailor he was, that he was brave and really wanted to fight against dictators like Trujillo and Batista. In an interview I did at the end of 2006, Collado defined Pichirilo in a romantic and revealing way: “Pichirilo used to sail the seas.” But you, without a doubt, were the person who knew him best, who knew his personality and his idiosyncrasies…those are necessary to write about him and so that other people learn of them.”

Unfortunately, what I know about Pichirilo is of great human interest, but extremely little, and that requires anyone writing about him to make a special effort to pull together the pertinent information about the person I came to know during a very short period of his life.

The idea never crossed my mind that some day we would have to render account of our modest existence.

I don’t know where Pichirilo came from. He was a Dominican who enlisted in the expedition set up to overthrow Trujillo in 1947.

When I set out from the coast northwest of Antilla, heading for distant Cayo Confites, to the northwest of Nuevitas and very close to Cayo Lobo in the English Bahamas, a few miles away, I did it in a type of small patrol vessel, whose captain was a man of the sea, a small man with a face weathered by the sun. His name was Pichirilo. After sailing for many hours, we reached Cayo Confites.

We met again later when I traveled for some days to the port of Nuevitas, around the month of July, to get in touch with my family and send them some news about myself.
I went back to the Cayo. I became friends with Pichirilo on those trips; he was several years older, I hadn’t even turned 21 yet and I was a simple recruit in that expedition that brought together more than 1,000 men.

Pichirilo continued to come and go from the Cayo to Nuevitas, supplying food for the expedition.

I talked a lot with him when we attacked Trujillo’s schooner Angelica when it was traveling from Miami to Santo Domingo, and passed close to Cayo Confites. I remember that Pichirilo was the one who identified it from quite a distance and he informed the commanders of the forces stationed in the Cayo. Low flying T-33 fighters from the anti-Trujillo expedition were skimming over the Cuban island, on tasks of demonstration and encouragement, and they showed up from time to time. I knew nothing else.

We had been there for months when the events of Orfila rocked the expedition, whose members were much more desirous of leaving for their destination than of remaining in inhospitable Cayo.

The first movement of its particular command, under the aegis of pseudo-revolutionaries and corrupt Cuban leaders, was eastward to carry out a maneuver threatening the Command of the National Army.

At Cayo Santa María, north of Caibarien, mass desertions took place. The Sandino Battalion and other components of the expedition were traveling in the Aurora, the landing craft. I was lieutenant and second in command of the vanguard of a battalion that was traveling in the bows of the vessel, with a machine gun as an antiaircraft weapon.

This is worth mentioning for just one reason: My friend Pichirilo was the second captain of the Aurora, aboard which Rodríguez, the former Dominican senator and chief of the expedition, with historical prestige for having been the anti-Machado head of the Gibara expedition in the north of Cuba, was traveling with other important leaders.
The treason committed by Masferrer at the command of the Fantasma, the other landing vessel in much better technical shape, decided my uprising since I could no resign myself to handing over the ship. Compliance with the naval order was reduced to that.
Genovevo Pérez Dámera, Cuban Army Chief, had sold himself to Trujillo for millions of dollars.

My great appreciation of Pichirilo stems from the fact that he took command of the ship to back me up and, in coordination with me, carried out great and audacious efforts to bluff the Cuban Navy corvette which, with two cannons at the ready in the bow, ordered us in the eastern extreme of Cuba to fall back to the port of Antilla in Nipe Bay where the rest of the expedition was already being held prisoner. My objective was to save most of the weapons the Aurora was carrying.
Everything revolved around that.

I won’t repeat what happened in the rest of the afternoon in regards to everything I experienced that day.

Ten years later, when the Granma left from Mexico, Pichirilo had joined us and, with all his audacity and courage, was second in command of the vessel. If only he had been the first in command, but that task was in the hands of a Cuban naval commander who was supposed to be an expert on the coasts and ports of our country.

I really do not know how Pichirilo saved his life after the Granma landing, when our detachment was virtually wiped out.

I found our at that time that Pichirilo was one of the 19 members of the Granma expedition who managed to escape without being tortured, murdered or sent to prison.
The task of knowing more about him will be the job of those who research the life of the Dominican combatant. I merely know that he fought, with the rank of commander under Caamaño, against the soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division who, along with more than 40,000 marines, landed in Quisqueya. He was shot on August 12, 1966 by officers of the Dominican intelligence corps during the presidency of Joaquín Balaguer; that corps was under the aegis of the United States government. He died hours later on August 13, on my 40th birthday. His death prompted a wave of protests in the city of Santo Domingo and his funeral turned into a combative demonstration of repudiation for the weak Balaguer government.

Nobody more than I would appreciate a biography of Ramón Emilio Mejías del Castillo, no matter how modest it might be. It is worth the effort so that men like him, Jiménez Moya, and other heroic combatants can be known by Dominicans and Cubans alike.



Fidel Castro Ruz
March 6, 2009
1:56 p.m.